keef dot org shows no signs of lethality or psychosis

I watched The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, Sergio Martino’s first film. It’s a murdery mystery giallo about a lady with a weird blood fetish. She’s since married respectably, but then her old bloody lover shows up and she gets scared, so she decides to embark on a new affair with a square-jawed fellow, because of course she does. Also, there’s a razor murderer on the loose, and people around her start dying.

It’s a fairly odd entry in the giallo annals. The plot is surprisingly convoluted, with a lot of characters to keep track of, a number of pretty great death scenes, a huge locale change halfway through, and then a very twisty-turny (but great) ending. This movie stars Edwige Fenech as Julia Wardh. Fenech is a mainstay of gialli from this period, and it’s easy to see why– she is beautiful. The problem is that she can’t really act very convincingly. She’s good at expressing turmoil and anguish, and that’s about it.

The standout in this film for me was Ivan Rassimov, who plays her old flame, Jean.

Here’s an interesting side note. For all of the Italian horror movies I’ve watched this month, I’ve preferred to watch them in the original Italian, with English subtitles. For this one, technical problems precluded the inclusion of the subtitles, and I watched it with the English dubbing in place– and then when I took the screenshots, I included the subtitles (different device, no technical problems). It led to this interesting little tidbit. In the above screenshot, Julie Wardh is at the police station, confronting Jean. She expresses her negative feelings toward him, and that’s part of his response.

However, the reason I wanted to include it at all was because the line as delivered was pretty incredible. The dubbing was actually better written than the subbing. Here’s the dubbed version, preceded by Julie telling Jean, “I loathe you.”

The only thing I cannot bear is indifference. Your best emotion is violent, raging hatred. Love is nothing compared to that.

And here’s the subbed version, preceded by Julie telling Jean, “I hate you.”

The only thing I can’t stand is indifference. Hate is a good feeling, it’s fiery and violent; like love, only more so.

Weird, right? I wish I spoke Italian, so I could actually take a listen to the original and compare it to both translations.

Anyway.

This is a weird-ass movie, man. I don’t know how I keep stumbling into these bizarro S&M gialli; eroticism (and gratuitous nudity) is a hallmark of the genre, but this one, coming on the heels of The Whip and the Body, takes it to some weird places. The two follow similar trajectories, for their female leads: in both cases, the ladies have moved on, remarried, and attempted to leave their (perceived-as) troubled pasts behind them; in both cases, they get drawn back into their perversions, unable to resist that intractable fetishism.

And hoo boy, that fetishism.

This particular gif comes from a dream sequence, but it’s fairly representative of the domination-driven sex scenes in this flick. In fact, it’s fairly tame, in comparison with others. A flashback shows us another instance of Julia and Jean getting freaky, only this time he breaks a wine bottle first, flinging the shards onto her; then he falls on top of her and they do the deed whilst grinding the broken glass between their writhing forms.

Holy balls, man.

Another thing this movie does pretty well is provide arresting visuals. Not great, but better than good. The dream sequences are filmed in a sort of gauze fisheye style; the long shots are filmed with a great eye and scope; the action sequences are gripping and well choreographed.

The soundtrack is also pretty good. Tarantino took chunks of it for Kill Bill vol. 2.

So. What are my thoughts on this movie overall? I didn’t hate it, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to love it. I guess you could say I thought it was…

So, here’s a thing about me: I love rock ‘n’ roll horror movies. I love them. I can’t get enough of them. They can be amazing (like Black Roses or Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare). They can be awful (like Slaughterhouse Rock, co-starring Toni Basil, or Dead Girls). Mostly, they’re mediocre (like Paganini Horror, or Lone Wolf, or Deadline, or… well, most of the rest of them). If it’s a horror movie and there’s a rock band in it, I’ll watch it.

The thing about rock ‘n’ roll horror movies is that they really peaked in the 1980s. The right-wing majority was decrying the moral turpitude of that hard rock music, Metallica and Judas Priest were incorporating backwards-masked satanic messages, and there was a fear and misunderstanding around rock ‘n’ roll that allowed filmmakers to really easily import the trappings wholesale and base a horror movie around them. Plus, you know, mad style. Leather! Studs! Spikes! Makeup!

Because they peaked in the 1980s, there haven’t been a lot of really good rock ‘n’ roll horror movies that have come out since then– there were a handful in the 1990s, some of which were decent, and then about a baker’s dozen since the turn of the century. (Full disclosure, here– I have most of them, but I haven’t watched them. I’m talking about Suck, Neowolf, Reverb, Studio 666, 13 Seconds, and other movies of their ilk. I haven’t watched them because 1) I’m pretty sure they’re going to be terrible; and 2) I don’t want to watch a terrible rock ‘n’ roll horror movie unless I’m with someone who will also enjoy a terrible rock ‘n’ roll horror movie (probably with a couple of beers).

Anyway. I’m delighted to say that there’s a new, modern entry in the rock ‘n’ roll horror canon, and it’s a masterpiece. That movie is Deathgasm, a New Zealand comedy-horror flick about a couple of metalhead teenagers who summon a demon. So, yes, double-whammy: rock ‘n’ roll horror AND a Kiwi comedy-splatter flick.

It’s pretty magical.

I don’t really need to explain the plot to you. Teen metalheads summon demon, must try to banish demon before extinction of earth. There’s some surrounding set dressing and frippery, but no one’s watching this movie for the plot. They’re watching it for the performances, the special effects (gore and demons), the humor, and the metal.

And hoo boy, does it deliver.

The titular heavy metal band is a group of angry surly high-school-aged kids. Whoever did the casting here did an amazing job– the bassist and guitarist look like every metalhead I knew in junior high and high school– one hulking angry dude, one skinny frenetic dude. The keyboardist is the nerdy bespectacled kid, and the drummer is the chubby one. They nail that stereotypical / archetypical High School Metal Band aesthetic. The main character gets a crush on a popular girl, who reciprocates– at which point, Bill said “They even have the popular girl who lets her freak flag fly!”

Beyond the acting, there’s a pretty good plot point revolving around a specific bit of weird bullshit high-school drama, which causes a bit of a rift in the band– and the bit of drama is exactly the kind of drama that I saw happen in multiple high school and college bands.

These guys absolutely nail the dynamics and characteristics of teenage bands.

Also, it’s hilarious on many levels.

When they can’t find other weapons to use against the demons, they come out swingin’ pipe like this (and a string of anal beads).

The antagonist is an honest-to-goodness satanist who wants to summon the demon for his own ends, and who employs a number of idiotic cultists, who can’t manage to get anything right. They behead a fellow on a really nice rug, for instance:

And that isn’t even the funniest part of that particular beheading scene.

This movie even has a bit of poignancy, albeit wry, smirking poignancy.

Also, it’s metal as fuck.

This movie, upon its emergence, has taken a rightful place in Keef’s Top Five Rock ‘n’ Roll Horror Movies of All Time. If you like super-goofy Kiwi splatter horror, you probably also like rock ‘n’ roll horror, and you should shell out for this movie.

I’ve continued my streak of new movies with Cooties, which came out last month in theaters and VOD. I first heard about it nearly two years ago, when it was prepping for Sundance, so I’ve been waiting for a while– thankfully, it was worth the wait.

The basis plot is this: tainted chicken nuggets are fed to a child at a school, who then becomes a murderous rampaging cannibalistic monster-demon. She spreads the disease to other children, who then all eat the adults. The movie follows a group of teachers as they try to avoid being eaten, and escape the hordes of tiny murder-cannibals.

The cast of teachers is incredible. Elijah Wood, Alison Pill, Rainn Wilson, Jack McBrayer, Nasim Pedrad, and Leigh Whannell. Elijah Wood plays a substitute teacher who’s moved back in with his mom to work on his book (a terrible possessed-boat horror novel called Keel Them All). Alison Pill is charming and fantastic, fully justifying the fact that I’ve been kind-of in love with her since Scott Pilgrim. Rainn Wilson is absolutely hilarious as the PE teacher, and Nasim Pedrad is great as the conservative weirdo.

Truly, however, the standout for me was Leigh Whannell. Known primarily as a writer– he wrote the first three Saw movies, Dead Silence, Insidious, et cetera, but he can actually act. In Cooties, he plays the science teacher, Doug, who had a traumatic brain injury as a child, and now lacks any social skills, leading him to make a whole bunch of weird honest blurtings that offset the potential terror. For example, after a heart-wrenching and meaningful monologue from another character, Doug says “I always wanted to have sex with a prostitute who was non-white.”

When Elijah Wood’s character gets attacked by a murderous child:

This is only part of what he hollers during that scene. Other tidbits: “He’s gonna bite your face!” and “You’ll look like that chimp woman!”

Whannell and Rainn Wilson steal the show. I watched this with Bill, and when I commented about how impressed I was with Wilson’s acting, Bill said, “Yeah, I really like him when he gets to not be Dwight.”

Et voila.

I should note also that I tried to watch this once before, at dinner time, and got about three minutes into it before needing to stop. The first three minutes are a straight-up disgust-fest taking place in a chicken factory farm, as the audience watches a chicken from the moment of procurement, through killing and butchering, and completing the nuggetization process.

Super gross.

This time, I made sure it was the top feature of a double-bill, and that dinner would be served after this flick.

Anyway.

In terms of overarching plot, this movie is completely by-the-numbers: a group of heroic teachers strive to outsmart, outrun, and outlast a group of zomboids. Where it really sings is in the characters and in the humor– the dialogue in this thing is on point, from the little kids being assholes, to Elijah Wood being obsessed with his (terrible) novel and being a narcissist-writer archetype, to the little kids themselves. I can’t really dump too much dialogue into this review, so I’ll just urge you to see it, and then give you a couple visual gags that I thought worked.

There’s a point about halfway through the movie where the weird cannibal zomboid kids are all on the playground, and there aren’t any adults to murder and eat, so they resort to playing some games. Up until this point, the only games we’ve seen the kids playing involve their phones, so it’s pretty hilarious to suddenly have this montage of new-age kids playing old-school games with gory components.

And perhaps best of all:

This movie was a darkly funny evil-child movie that worked perfectly for me. If you need further details to sell you this movie– which you shouldn’t– I’ll just mention that at one point, Rainn Wilson picks up a small child and uses it as a bludgeon against other small children.

You should probably see this movie, if that sounds hilarious to you (and it should).

Last night, I watched a couple of basic home invasion horror movies. The first was Death Game, a 1977 movie starring Seymour Cassel (the dad from Rushmore), Sondra Locke, and Colleen Camp.

Then I watched Knock Knock, which just came out; it’s directed by Eli Roth, and stars Keanu Reeves, Lorenza Izzo, and Ana de Armas.

Death Game is about a family man whose family leaves for the weekend, and then he gets a knock on the door: it’s two cute girls who can’t find the right address to a party they want to attend, and they’re drenched in rain and freezing. He lets them in, they seduce him, and then they reveal that they’re completely insane. They torture him, wreck his house, and commit a murder, before returning to the dad-torture. Knock Knock is about a family man whose family leaves for the weekend, and then… well, it’s a remake of Death Game, so I won’t go through the whole thing. It’s updated and changed for a modern era, to include social media and cellphones, basically; also, it can get way more explicit and gross:

It also has some kind of weird ideas about youth culture. Let’s get into it first with Death Game.

Spoilers ahead. Yarr. Ahoy.

Seymour Cassel is fantastic as the dad in the movie. He’s rockin’ the 70s old-man dad bod and moustache, and his house is perfect: really nice stereo, everything in muted 70s earth-tones and not a lot of natural light, shrubbery all around the front door. He’s celebrating his 40th birthday, and sees his wife and kids off for the weekend. That night, the girls show up, he lets them in, rebuffs a couple of advances, and then succumbs to their wily charms. That succumbing, by the way, is so weird and hilarious– straight-up porn music starts blaring, and then there’s about five minutes of double-exposed film, usually a long-shot of writhing bodies and a close-up of a face or an arm or something; it’s clearly meant to be hellaciously titillating, but it ends up looking like a weird flesh-tone squid occupying two or three dimensions at once, especially because the source film for this movie never had any sort of preservation or cleaning measures taken. The soundtrack pushes it over the edge into weird absurdity.

The next morning he wakes up and the girls are making breakfast. He joins them, and then it becomes clear that they’re straight-up insane, picking up eggs with their fingers and not using napkins and dredging pancakes through eggs and jelly and all manner of transgressions against polite society. The whole time during breakfast, the old man is quietly and civilly smoking and ashing into a little saucer. You know, like a grown man does. Until he tells them that they’re behaving like animals.

They start destroying his furniture and playing his stereo too loud and beating the shit out of him. He threatens to call the cops, but they tell him that they’re both underage. They tie him to a bed and continue their rampant destruction. This continues pretty much unabated for the rest of the movie. Locke and Camp both manage to strike a weird balance between malevolence and wide-eyed naivete: Camp, at several points, proclaims her actual fondness for the man that they’re victimizing, and Locke’s character seems to be operating as pure id, chaotic but not necessarily evil (except for a few points).

This movie’s kind of hard to pin down, thematically.

Maybe it’s about the 1970s perceived breakdown of social order, as represented here by the sheer barbarism of an untended bottle of ketchup pooling and spilling, splattered on the base of a fine silver serving platter, and staining the tablecloth:

A shot which, no shit, lasts thirty-seven seconds. I know because I timed it.

Perhaps it’s a message about the things that go wrong when the lecherous older generation preys on the younger, as represented here by a shot of a rotten banana trailing up and down a milky-white thigh.

Maybe it’s about the new generation having no respect for the old, as represented by this shot of Max Fischer’s dad getting drenched in foodstuffs:

But in actuality, I think it’s probably just a weird exploitation movie that’s taking advantage of the relatively recent home invasion and multiple murders of the Manson Family, and the willingness of Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp to disrobe. That super-weird five-minute, flesh-toned, porno-soundtracked montage at the beginning defies any other description.

Oh, yeah, spoiler: in the last five seconds of the film, an SPCA van literally swerves around a corner out of nowhere and mows down both girls.

Now let’s move on to Knock Knock.

I have some problems with Eli Roth in general. He hasn’t made any movies that I have thoroughly and unabashedly loved. Don’t get me wrong, here, I like his movies just fine, especially Cabin Fever, but it always seems like there’s a running thread through all of them of cruelty for the sake of cruelty. The times when it works the best are the times when you, as an audience, have a character to empathize with– in Hostel, Paxton was a swaggery but ultimately good-natured character through which to encounter the mindless cruelty of the movie, and it made that movie much more palatable.

The problem is that all of Roth’s movies, aside from Hostel, fail to give you that empathetic character. Cabin Fever has Karen, but she’s the first to go, and then we’re stuck with a bunch of assholes. Hostel 2 never intends to let us empathize with any of the characters– it’s just intended to be a cartoonish, grisly murderfest from minute one. Knock Knock continues that trend, with weird douche-dad Keanu Reeves (whose wife and kids are the only decent characters in the movie, and they’re only onscreen for the first ten minutes).

The opening shots of this movie are a slow tracking shot through the house, where literally every wall has huge photographs of Keanu and his family. Literally every wall. I can’t even tell if this is supposed to paint a picture of a family that’s deeply tied together and wants to display it to the world; or a deeply weird and narcissistic family member demanding representation; or just tell us that the family is tone-deaf when it comes to what normally passes for domestic decoration. I just know it’s fucking weird and immediately makes me wonder who these weird people are and dislike them. One row of pictures on the mantel? No problem. A few hanging pictures throughout the house? Hey, fine by me. Three-foot by three-foot studio shots on literally every wall in your house? There’s something wrong with you.

Anyway.

Ten minutes of footage showing us the happy family, blah blah, they leave for a weekend at the beach, blah blah, the girls show up at the door. He invites them in, blah blah. The one part of this movie that was really novel and fairly clever was that it actually incorporates modern technology in a legitimate and encompassing way– he calls the girls an Uber (or Uber-alike) and tracks its progress on his phone; because it’ll be a while, it gives him a chance to interact with them more, and turn down their initial advances.

Eventually blah blah he bangs them both, blah, then he wakes up, breakfast, blah. Then his wife FaceTimes him, and he runs out into the yard to take it. There’s an actually really well done hilarious moment where the two girls attempt to photobomb by doing the lady-front equivalent of a pressed ham:

Then blah blah blah, jailbait revelations, can’t call the cops, torture, bondage, makeup…

Throughout the torture, the two crazy girls are perpetually snarling at Keanu for being a philanderer and a pedo, which, you know, they’ve got a point. They’ve got none of the goofy naivete of Death Game here: these girls are psychopaths, cruel and smart and mean. Their motives are a bit more clear than in the original– they’re clearly taking revenge for something they’ve endured. There’s a running thread about de Armas’ character’s childhood that’s disgusting and awful.

At one point, they throw a mock trial, and Keanu defends himself by talking about how they threw themselves at him, referring to the girls’ showing up at his door unannounced and pressuring him into sexual compliance.

So, none of the main characters in this movie warrant any empathy at all. An SPCA van could have swerved around a corner halfway through this movie and mowed all of the characters down, then backed up and done it again until they were a patch of jelly on the road, and I wouldn’t have really cared. They’re all eminently unlikeable.

The reason this movie isn’t 100% hot garbage is just because of its use of technology: the Uber, the FaceTime, the cellphones-as-cameras, and then a “Twilight Zone”-y ending bit where the girls upload a sex tape to Facebook and Keanu has to sit there, buried in the dirt, and watch the comments roll in from all of his friends and loved ones. In an era where there’s a movement to 1) make a period piece to avoid modern tech altogether; 2) contrive extenuating circumstance to separate characters from their tech; or 3) inexplicably have all cell providers collude to provide “no service” areas when a phone is needed most, this is refreshing in that it full-on embraces modern technology and actually uses it in interesting ways to further the plot.

Now, some general notes on both movies, and a compare-and-contrast.

In Death Game, the old-man dad smokes as a signifier of maturity, while neither of the girls smoke. In Knock Knock, both girls smoke, a signifier of immaturity, while none of the adults do.

Another interesting saving grace in Knock Knock: they don’t hurt his pet. In Death Game, the girls hurt the dad’s pet, which is always among the cheapest, shittiest moves a horror flick can do to win empathy / sympathy / horror, and which almost always enrages me. Knock Knock sidesteps that, which is a point in its favor.

Keanu’s character is older than Cassel’s, but looks about twenty years younger. Chalk it up to all Cassel’s Cassavettes movies, I guess.

Today we’re going to look at another lady-driven monster movie, this one about an Iranian vampire. The movie is Ana Lily Amirpour’s…

This is a weird one. It calls itself an “Iranian Vampire Spaghetti Western,” but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. The director was born in Britain and lives in America. It was filmed in California, using primarily American (well, Iranian-American) actors. Don’t get me wrong, I love this movie… but this is an American movie. And ugh, this is a bullshit tangent that doesn’t matter, because this movie is beautiful and amazing. Amirpour channels Jarmusch, Tarantino, and Coppola (well, primarily Rumble Fish).

Everything’s filmed in high-contrast black and white. It’s slow and extremely stylish.

There are a few strange choices. There’s an Iranian pimp, the true antagonist of the movie and a real shitbag. He steals the main character’s car as payment for his father’s heroin debts. He takes all of the earnings from one of his hookers and then forces her into demeaning situations. All fairly standard “bad-guy-pimp” behavior. The odd choice is that the dude looks exactly like the dude from Die Antwoord. Face tattoos, weird crappy moustache, hi-top fade. Also– spoiler alert– he gets eaten in the first half-hour of the movie, and the rest of the movie follows the unfolding and intersecting of the remaining characters in the vacuum left behind by his death, in a very Tarantino-esque inevitable collision.

The characters, by the way, are pretty fascinating. Arash is a young man who works as a general handyman, who exudes that 50s-white-T, James Dean, Rusty James-type cool. His father (played by Marshall Manesh, who you’d recognize if you saw) is a junkie, deep in debt. Saeed is the gross-ass pimp (who steals Arash’s convertible). Atti is a hooker (played fantastically by Mozhan Marnò, who you’d also recognize). These characters are all racked by tumultuous inner turmoil, and the most racked of all is the titular character, played beautifully by Sheila Vand. At points, she seems to be projecting Renée Jeanne Falconetti from The Passion of Joan of Arc, all huge winsome eyes, suffering, and tragic circumstance.

Other times, that tragedy is tempered by fun.

And lest you forget, she’s a vampire. She murders a few people, threatens a few more, the entire time looking beautiful and exotic, eyes all kohl, black lipstick, chador acting as an impromptu (and effective) black cape.

So: outstanding cast; incredible cinematography; great style; excellent pacing. This movie’s got a lot going for it already. What brings it all home, and actually manages to make the whole thing cohere, is the soundtrack.

The movie opens with expansive twangy spaghetti instrumental Western music from Portland band Federale, which carries throughout. Periodically, Persian music makes appearances– Iranian bands Kiosk and Radio Tehran knock it out of the park as well. But the heart and soul of this movie is in the New Wave / Post-Punk stuff, mostly by British band White Lies. This soundtrack is really fucking good, especially in conjunction with the beautiful imagery.

I really liked this movie, and I’m really, really looking forward to her next one (The Bad Batch, which she calls a ‘postapocalyptic cannibal love story,’ and which stars Jason Momoa, Keanu Reeves, and Jim Carrey. What?). That said, I can’t give this a full perfect score– I feel like the influences are too heavy on her sleeve. I kept seeing slow sky shots and thinking of Rumble Fish, or bloody close-ups and thinking Kill Bill, or lingering interpersonal reactions and thinking Stranger Than Paradise. The decision to base Saeed so heavily on the Die Antwoord guy pulled me out of it the entire time he was onscreen– even if it’s interpreted as a choice by this character to adopt that specific look, it broke the narrative for me every time (and yes, your mileage may vary on that score).

Still: watch this movie anyway. Watch it for the cinematography, the cast. Watch it for the inimitable style. Watch it for the soundtrack.

Watch it for the cat, who is awesome, and nearly steals the show in more than a couple scenes.

The other night, I watched a double-feature of two new horror movies featuring ladies as monsters: When Animals Dream, a Danish movie about a young girl who discovers that she is a werewolf, and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, an black-and-white American movie filmed in California, set in Iran (and with dialogue in Persian), about a woman who is a vampire. They were both very good. Today, I’ll talk about the former, and tomorrow, the latter. Let’s get into it.

When Animals Dream starts off with a series of beautiful clouded vignettes featuring remote Danish locations and no people, over which the opening credits are shown. They’re beautiful and strange, showcasing a tiny nameless Danish fishing village. Odd living-room tableaux. Darkened moors, a small lantern bobbing in the distance. Fields of scrubland, sparse clumps of vegetation. Tiny houses set off on dirt roads, featureless expanses beyond to the horizon.

It’s a beautiful introduction to the strange world in which this movie takes place, glowing and cinematic and slow, before we even meet any of the characters.

The main character of When Animals Dream is Marie. She’s a late-teens girl living with her father and her mother, who is nonverbal and wheelchair-bound. We see her feeding her mother, and we see her father bathing her mother and periodically giving her injections. Marie gets a job at a fish cleaning and packing warehouse, where things quickly start to get a little rough.

The basic outlay of this movie is fairly well-trodden territory: it’s the story of Carrie. A young girl faces societal pressures, which build until those pressures unleash something hidden within her. It’s a revenge movie, basically, which takes all of the pressure off of the plotting, and allows for the visuals, pacing, and acting to really take center stage.

Once Marie starts working at the fish packery, her co-workers start to haze her. They push her into a pond full of rotting and fetid fish heads and skeletons.

When she’s hauled out by the foreman, she gets a round of applause from all of her co-workers, giving the sense that this is a mandatory rite of passage for all employees of the plant; but then the hazing continues in a much more unpleasant manner, that leaves no doubt that she’s been targeted for ongoing abuse.

Meanwhile, she discovers a small rash on her chest. She sees the doctor, who tells her to let him know if it spreads or gets worse. It starts to (very quickly) sprout a thicket of hair, which she shaves off with a small pink disposable razor. Her eyes start to do this weird thing:

When I was watching this movie, I kept thinking about the Jezebel review of the Carrie remake, bemoaning the casting of Chloe Grace Moretz (who is a wonderful actress, but too beautiful to play outcast Carrie White) and referring to Sissy Spacek as an “actual feral prairie ghost.” Sonia Suhl is the Danish equivalent of that actual feral prairie ghost, all angular features, wide-eyed timidity, and grasping, vulnerable loneliness.

Eventually, Marie begins to understand that her mother is feared and reviled by the members of the village community, and that the injections she receives are designed to keep her sedated and near-comatose. After sprouting more hair, Marie is confronted by her father and her doctor, who attempt to give her an injection.

I’m loath to give more away here, because the way it unfolds is satisfying and fascinating. I’ll keep going with the screenshots, and discuss the movie in more general terms.

These days, a lot more horror movies seem to have no problem taking their time, which is a development that I absolutely love. After an inundation of movies that leap straight to the horror (I’m looking at you, Saw), it’s nice to see a return to the slow introduction. I’ve always been a firm believer in the Stephen King adage that horror doesn’t really work unless the audience actually cares about the characters. Hack’n’slash movies have their place, but they function more as gruesome spectacle, and rarely inspire actual horror. Here’s a quote from King’s Danse Macabre that has stuck with me from a young age:

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.

As a clarification: terror is the emotion leading up to a horrible occurrence– that sense of dread, anxiety, and impending doom. Horror is the mixture of empathetic fear and nauseous disgust that happens after the horrible occurrence.

This movie deals primarily in terror. You can see the impending crash of awfulness, but first-time director Jonas Alexander Arnby somehow dodges expectations, and the actual moments of shock and awfulness often come out of left field– and then they end up piling back onto the inevitable stack of dread, allowing that anxiety and dread to continue.

When hell finally breaks loose, it’s almost a relief.

Actual Danish tidal-pool ghost Sonia Suhl, who plays Marie, really shines throughout, and continues her incredible performance once she sheds her humanity and becomes a werewolf. There’s no longer even any hint of personhood there, and Marie really becomes an animal, an exemplification of revenge, and the explosive, inevitable violence of cornered ferocity.

And then, the aftermath: a mirroring of the beginning. A series of tableaux, this time of the aftermath.

This movie is beautiful and strange and striking. I recommend it.

So, after all these half-century-old flicks, I figured it was time for me to turn my attention to some more recent entries in the horror genre. There have been some great ones this year, including some truly wonderful movies– I’m thinking specifically here of It Follows and Spring, both incredible new horror movies. There have also been a number of movies that I just haven’t seen yet– so now I will.

Last night, I watched Final Girls. It’s been getting a fair amount of interest, and it stars a lot of people I really like: Taissa Farmiga, Malin Ackerman, Thomas Middleditch, and Adam Devine, and Alia Shawkat, among others. I know the majority of the people in this flick from alternative comedy stuff, so I knew full well that this was going to be a campy comedy-horror flick. I know Taissa Farmiga from American Horror Story, where she acquits herself admirably, and can clearly hold her own in the legit horror world.

This movie was well worth the seven bucks. I highly recommend it.

So, I’m the kind of weirdo who actively avoids any spoilers at all. I won’t even watch trailers, if I can help it. I just take interest when movies hover into my field of interest enough for me to take notice of them– which isn’t hard, because I follow a lot of film and media bloggers. All of this is by way of saying that I’m not exactly sure what’s common knowledge about the premise of this movie and what’s not. I didn’t really know the basic premise of this movie at all before I watched it. I just knew that it had been getting good reviews (and also that Thomas Middleditch fails to jump over a velvet rope). So if you’re the kind of weirdo who, like me, prefers his movie-viewing experiences to be relatively unspoiled, you might want to quit reading.

So, the premise of this movie is basically that a small group of high school students actually enter a 1980s campground slasher movie, and have to contend with what they find there. That’s a rough encapsulation; one of the girls is the daughter of one of the stars of the movie, who has since passed away; there are somewhat complicated relationships between some of the characters, et cetera, et cetera. The important bit, the high-concept, is that a small group of modern teenagers enter a 1980s slasher flick.

And man, the whole thing is pretty stylish, and pretty meta. They keep encountering things like the original credits, and the original title screen:

At one point, one of the original characters in the 1980s movie starts spinning a flashback, and then all these weird icicles drop from the ceiling and encircle everybody:

Before whisking them back in time to the movie’s flashback (which is in black-and-white), complete with title card displaying the date. The title card is actually part of the scenario they have to interact with, stepping over it to get around it.

I’m a sucker for little metatextual bits like that. There are all kinds of little flourishes like that– at one point, Malin Ackerman’s character says something like “She always says the best thing in the world is smoking pot and doing it on a waterbed,” which is a direct reference to the movie Pieces, a terrible early-80s slasher flick I saw (and blogged about) a little over a week ago. I’m sure there are dozens more of these direct callbacks that I missed. This movie is wry and self-aware and deeply knowledgeable of the source material that it’s not-exactly-parodying.

Because it’s packed with all these amazing comedy actors, there is no shortage of really funny moments, both visual and textual. Alia Shawkat is a master of the ol’ dry-and-wry, and her talents are on full display here. Malin Ackerman can spin on a dime, from earnestly playing the 80s horror heroine to deadpan delivery of terrible horror-movie staple dialogue, which is hilarious. Thomas Middleditch and Adam Devine were clearly given a lot of room to improvise, which leads to all sorts of bizarre exchanges and hilarious moments.

Oh, and there’s no shortage of visually interesting violence.

The thing that surprised me most about Final Girls is that it actually has some emotional impact, and it comes in some pretty unexpected forms. There’s a cheesy striptease that actually manages to be sad and meaningful and really touching. A sad striptease. Not in the gross Requiem For a Dream sad way; not even in the gross Closer way. It’s sad in a new way, a way you’d more commonly associate with Pixar movies (the sad striptease summoned the same emotions BingBong did in Inside Out, if that means anything to you). It literally, legitimately made me tear up a little bit.

As I said, well worth the seven bucks. I recommend it.

After the amazing spectacle that was Blood and Black Lace, I decided I needed to get more familiar with the director of that film, Mario Bava. He was a cinematographer for a dozen years before actually stepping up to direct, albeit uncredited (Ulysses, a retelling of The Odyssey starring Kirk Douglas, five years before Spartacus). He did a bunch of westerns, a bunch of peplum (sword-and-sandals) movies, he basically started the giallo movie trend, directed several science fiction films, slasher films, and gothic horror movies.

This one is The Whip and the Body, released a year before Blood and Black Lace. I’ve grown a little weary of giallo movies, so I decided to roll with this one– it’s a gothic horror movie starring Christopher Lee, and Lee always maintained that it was one of his best movies.

Hoo boy, it’s a doozy. This entire blog is basically an excuse to show you these beautiful, beautiful pictures.

Lee plays Kurt Menliff. The opening shots feature him riding up to a castle. It’s beautifully lit and framed. When he gets there, he’s greeted with trepidation and downright animosity by his father and his brother. He left years before, apparently, after driving the daughter of one of the housekeepers to suicide. The housekeeper, by the way, still works there– and still has the dagger her daughter killed herself with. She swears that before she dies, she’ll see Kurt impaled on it.

Kurt’s there purportedly to wish his brother congratulations on his new marriage. It turns out that Nevenka, the woman Kurt’s brother just married, used to be Kurt’s special lady. They used to have some kinda thang goin’ on– and the next morning, when Kurt finds her on the beach, that thang just keeps goin’.

The thang is, basically, he whips the crap out of her, she loves it, and then they knock boots.

He leaves her there and goes back to the castle, holding her riding crop, which he claims he found outside the castle. They ask him where she is, and he claims not to have seen her– he was just out riding around. Then he drops this hot potato:

OH SNAAAAAP

In other news, the castle is beautiful. The costumes, the sets, the lighting, the color. This is precisely what a beautiful technicolor gothic horror castle should look like.

Anyway, Kurt gets murdered with that dagger.

Then his ghost starts showing up on a nightly basis, menacing Nevenka (and sometimes whipping the shit out of her for sexual pleasure).

These scenes are pretty bonkers, you guys. I mean, there’s one in particular where Christopher Lee is just going nuts on Nevenka with a riding crop and she’s rolling around moaning in ecstasy, and I straight up could not believe this was a major motion picture in the 1960s.

I mean, apparently it never made it through unscathed– the US-released version cut out all of the weird S&M stuff– about fifteen minutes’ worth, a full sixth of the movie– and was retitled “WHAT?!,” presumably because it now made zero sense, and left audiences confused and scratching their heads.

Strange footprints appear in the weird creepy castle. Kurt’s father is also murdered with the same dagger.

Holy shit, the sets are beautiful, especially when bathed in Bava’s peculiar and magnificent color and lighting.

Eventually, they dig up Kurt’s corpse. To make sure he’s dead.

SPOILER: He is.

As they dig him up, he appears to Nevenka again, telling her that because they’re about to open his coffin, she’ll never see him again, and demanding that she come with him.

Then they set his moldering-ass corpse on fire!

Man, this movie is beautiful.

THE END

SORRY FOR THE WEIRD TRUNCATED BLOG YOU GUYS I JUST REALLY LIKED ALL THESE SET PIECES AND NEEDED AN EXCUSE TO POST TWELVE SCREENSHOTS

The other night, I watched Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace. It was recommended to me a few years ago by my friend Jeremy, who was taken aback and shocked that I had never seen it. I swore to him that I would watch it at the first available opportunity. A couple months after that, I started watching it, and then fell asleep after about twenty minutes or so. I don’t know if it turned me off because of the subtitles, or because of the slow and dramatic storytelling, or what. Having now seen it in its entirety, I absolutely cannot believe that I fell asleep during this movie.

Because this movie is great.

The version that I watched was most likely German in origin, hence the title (which translates to “Bloody Silk,” apparently).

I have made the mistake of assuming that Bava was a lesser director. In all of my thinking about Italian horror in general, I’ve always been an Argento man through-and-through (primarily because of Suspiria, which is one of the greatest horror movies ever made). After Argento came Lucio Fulci (primarily for Zombie, but also The Beyond and The House By the Cemetary). I’m not sure why I thought that– maybe because the only Bava I’d seen was Danger: Diabolik, which is a masterpiece, but of a different stripe altogether.

Blood and Black Lace is throwing my “Italian Horror Directors” ranking list into total disarray. You can see a whole lot of Bava in Argento– there are a lot of direct correlations between this movie and the Argento movies I discussed previously, which came out a half-dozen years after this. Hell, there are a lot of direct correlations between this movie and Suspiria: the use of color, the use of pacing, the use of specific emotional cues among the murder set-pieces.

This movie sort of laid the foundation for a lot of my favorite horror movies of this style and type: it’s slow and brutal and absolutely beautiful.

The plot is almost circumstantial. An Italian fashion and design house is filled with administrators, models, designers, and fabricators. Their personal lives are riddled with vice and misdeeds: drug abuse and trafficking, surreptitious abortions, adultery, mounting unpaid debts, corruption, and blackmail.

The design house is also beautiful in and of itself. Among the white wicker dress forms, there are mannequins in deep bleeding red; everything’s filled with supersaturated colors, and everyone casts an ominous shadow.

One of the young and beautiful models, Isabella, has been keeping a diary. In this diary, she’s been keeping records of all of her coworkers’ horrible transgressive societal taboos, complete with names, dates, and all the grisly details. Because of course you would do that, right– maintain a running tally of all your acquaintances’ shameful secrets? What could go wrong?

She’s murdered for it, of course– within the first five minutes of the movie. By a person wearing black leather gloves, a long trench coat, and a flesh-colored mask that covers all his features. Think Rorschach without the patterns, and flesh-colored. So, think The Question, if your comic-book knowledge runs that deep.

Pretty stylish choices, anonymous murderer. Pretty stylish choices, Mario Bava.

While the fashion house is preparing for their next show, and in full view of literally everyone else in the house, Nicole finds Isabella’s diary. Peggy takes it out of her purse and runs off with it. After the show, Nicole drives to an antique shop owned by her lover. There’s a knock at the door. Nicole answers it, and the murderer rushes through, searching for the diary, and chases her around.

Bava’s directorial talents are on full display here. Nicole is chased through what appears to be a massive medieval warehouse full of beautiful antiques, many of which are amazingly colorful and fascinating. Some of the lightbulbs are apparently purple, some are green. Some are deep red. There’s a beautiful shot where Nicole runs up some stairs and the camera follows her up– it looks like a crane shot– and the colors shift with the movement. The chase scene is full of amazing moments.

That crane shot, by the way– not actually a crane shot. In my research about this movie to write this blog, I found a bit about this chase scene, which claimed that Bava didn’t have much of a budget and had to improvise– so he used a child’s little red wagon for tracking shots, and a “see-saw mechanism” for crane shots. The scene goes on for a very long time, and manages to maintain suspense throughout. Nicole finally manages to get into a hallway and make it to the front door, which she begins to unlock–

Surprise! The murderer has somehow managed to silently put on a full coat of medieval plate armor, including the helmet. Nicole gets a weird medieval three-pronged murderglove to the face! The murderer searches her, but the diary is nowhere to be found.

While all this is happening, Peggy has taken the diary home. All her secrets are in it as well as everyone else’s, so she throws it into her fireplace and turns it into ashes. Whew! Crisis averted!

Right? Crisis averted, guys?

Oh no, wait. The masked figure bursts in on her, roughs her up, and demands the diary. She says she burned it, but he doesn’t believe her, so the roughing-up continues. The police arrive during his interrogation, so he slings her over his shoulder and hauls her off to some undisclosed location. He demands the diary again, she again tells him that she burned it. So, of course, he presses her face against a red-hot furnace and then kills her.

The police have found Nicole’s body by this point, so they know there’s a definite pattern of murder here. They’ve also uncovered a little bit about the drugs. They round up a bunch of suspects and hold them in custody.

Greta, another girl, drives home from the fashion house. Once she gets there, she hears a strange noise coming from the back of her car. She opens the trunk, and Peggy’s burned-ass face rolls out. The camera holds on it for a long time as the wind blows through her hair. It’s oddly beautiful.

Instead of calling the police, the way you or I would, Greta chooses a different path. Remember, she’s carrying the burden of a whole pocketful of destructive personal secrets. I’m not positive about this, but I believe she was part of the drug trafficking ring? She helped one of the male designers keep himself all smacked up all the time? Anyway, she’s racked with secrets!

Remember that part about the plot being secondary to the visuals and murder set-pieces?

Greta slowly, clumsily, awkwardly puts her arms under poor dead Peggy’s arms, hoists her out of the trunk, and carries her into the house. The camera doesn’t cut or look away for any of this, even when Greta tries to maneuver the body up a set of stairs, stumbles, and drops it.

The murderous set-pieces in this movie are two things. They are brutal and they are beautiful.

They are brutal in that there is zero titillation to really be had. You can’t really watch these murders rapt with glee, enjoying the choreography and violence. Bava’s nearly Hitchcockian in his reluctance to show actual violence, preferring short quick cuts; he’ll draw out the lead-up to violence, and he’ll linger on the horrible aftermath, but he doesn’t spend a whole lot of time on the actual moment-to-moment gore. Far from being a disappointment, this ends up being the merciful choice. The violence itself– not the lead-up, not the aftermath– is extremely unpleasant. I found myself wincing more than once, and even looking away. When Peggy’s face hits that red-hot furnace, the shot is from the back of her head, and it lasts maybe half a second, but holy shit, it packs some hellacious impact. When Greta stumbles and drops that body, the camera doesn’t even flinch. So brutal.

They are beautiful in their lead-up and aftermath. That ornate, lingering chase through the antique shop. Peggy’s hair blowing in the wind. The dappled moonlight scattering on Isabella’s face through the leaves. It’s beautiful and horrible.

When Tao-Li (yet another beautiful model) gets drowned in the bathtub, and then has her wrists slashed to make it look like suicide, it’s eerie and slow and beautiful:

Even this horrible shot, showing the corpses of Peggy and Greta (oh yeah, she gets murdered too), is beautiful in its eerie composition, coloring, and framing.

I was deeply impressed with Blood and Black Lace. I’ve decided that I need to familiarize myself with Mario Bava’s catalog further– so y’all can look forward to more entries about him in the near future.

I really can’t stress enough how creepy, beautiful, and well-directed this movie is.

I think this might be my last giallo for a while. I was getting a bit burned out, and with this masterpiece, I think the binge has reached its inevitable end. The giallo run is going out on a high note.

It’s time for another Giallo! For some reason, I’ve really been digging on these. A little more subtle than slashers, a little more gory than thrillers. This go-round, I watched Paolo Cavara’s The Black Belly of the Tarantula. Someone somewhere claimed that this is the best giallo ever made, and I had to test this theory. I found that I disagreed, but I did enjoy the movie a whole hell of a lot. Like the Argento gialli I detailed in my last blog entry, this one was also scored by Ennio Morricone. Dude got around.

The “plot” of this movie is basically just connecting tissue to string together the murder and nudity set-pieces. A sex-crazy she-dame who frequents a particular salon is murdered thusly: a thick acupuncture needle coated in a paralytic is jammed into her neck, leaving her paralyzed but aware. Then a knife is plunged into her belly, and she’s disemboweled while apparently feeling every excruciating second of it.

It turns out she was being blackmailed for her wacky sex-desires and adultery! Then another woman is murdered in exactly the same way. This one was a drug dealer, and was also being blackmailed. Lo, a pattern emerges! The hunt for the sex-crazed psychopath is afoot! A police inspector with an awesome 1970s moustache is on the case.

The reason for the title– and the supposed corollary to the murderer’s methodology– is the behavior of the tarantula hawk wasp, which is described by Wikipedia thusly:

The female tarantula hawk captures, stings, and paralyzes the spider, then either drags her prey back into her own burrow or transports it to a specially prepared nest, where a single egg is laid on the spider’s abdomen, and the entrance is covered… When the wasp larva hatches, it creates a small hole in the spider’s abdomen, then enters and feeds voraciously, avoiding vital organs for as long as possible to keep the spider alive. After several weeks, the larva pupates. Finally, the wasp becomes an adult, and emerges from the spider’s abdomen to continue the life cycle.

Which is really, truly, awful. That’s right up there with the old dream of being not able to move but being totally aware as the coroner starts his autopsy on you. Or being buried alive and awake and unable to tell anyone about it. These are old tropes for a reason– they still scare the unholy crap out of people. Anyway, the movie explains this reasoning in an amazing sequence where it actually shows the tarantula hawk wasp straight-up fighting a tarantula and then beginning the horrifying larva-depositing sequence:

The husband of the first victim, a suspect in both murders, decides that he needs to prove his innocence, and so begins his own hunt for the murderer. He hires a private eye, and tracks down the photographer who was blackmailing both women, and his girlfriend, who is the more vicious (and smart) of the two.

This leads to a straight-up incredible rooftop struggle scene, and the photographer shoves the first victim’s husband, culminating in what can only be described as a truly beautiful and wondrous example of the “camera following a person to their horrible gruesome falling death” shot.

God, I love these.

Anyway, the photographer is found dead. Then his girlfriend, the other half of the blackmailing duo, is also found brutally murdered. Jenny, a masseuse at the spa from the beginning of the film, is also found murdered. The hits just keep on coming! The photography, by the way, is pretty nice. Jenny’s corpse is found dead by the garbage man, who tears open a trash bag and finds her gazing skyward beatifically, like some wayward blackmailing trash-Saint:

The inspector, beginning to believe that there’s something going on with the spa, goes there and discovers yet another dead lady! SO MANY DEAD LADIES, YOU GUYS.

It becomes apparent that the murderer is now targeting the Inspector’s girlfriend. He rushes to his apartment, finds her paralyzed in bed, and confronts the murderer.

He does this by dropping his gun, staring at the murderer for a really long time, and then allowing me to create perhaps the greatest gif so far this year:

The Black Belly of the Tarantula was pretty good. Three and a half stars out of five. It would be rated higher, but there’s no real mystery that the viewer can follow along– there are no clues, as such, meaning that the ultimate reveal of the murderer is basically meaningless. As a string of set-pieces, however, it’s great; and Morricone’s score really enhances the whole thing.