Early outing by director
Terry Gilliam (fresh from Monty Python) that holds up surprisingly well. Young Kevin’s life with his boorish consumerist
parents is disrupted by six time-travelling dwarves who have stolen a map from
the Supreme Being that shows all of the holes in space-time, allowing them to
steal treasures from various epochs. Unfortunately, the Evil Genius, who has been
imprisoned in the Fortress of Darkness by the Supreme Being also wants the map
in order to escape and refigure the world. Kevin and the little people meet
Napoleon (Ian Holm), Robin Hood (John Cleese), and King Agamemnon (Sean
Connery) before entering the Land of Legends where things get weirder. The
special effects are pretty cool (for the time period) and although things get
dark, it seems appropriate for kids. At
least until the end, when Kevin’s parents are turned into lumps of coal – Amon (aged
10) did not appreciate this and thought it spoiled the film. So much for black comedy.
Classic folk-horror
with Christopher Lee as the Lord of Summerisle, off the coast of Scotland,
where the old Pagan traditions are valued. So, there’s a culture clash when
Edward Woodward (as Sargeant Howie), a devout Catholic, shows up to investigate
a missing girl about whom his department has been tipped off. But no one seems to
recollect the missing girl (Rowan) or else they are hiding something! Howie
struggles to understand the locals who have a very free approach to sexuality
that upsets his prudish nature. Moreover, the May-Day festival is soon
approaching and the island is preparing for a big celebration that will include
animal costumes and a parade – plus, as Howie discovers at the library, the
possibility of a virgin (Rowan?) being sacrificed! He is determined to thwart anything horrible
that might occur -- but he is entangled in a mystery that he can’t quite solve.
Director Robin Hardy apparently released a director’s cut that is a bit longer
(and with some scenes in a different order) than the 88 min theatrical cut I
watched. Probably best not to forget that this is a horror film (and the end is
certainly shocking) but the film certainly pushes you to appreciate the old
ways, don’t you think?
Dead of Night (1945)
– A. Cavalcanti, C. Crichton, B. Dearden, & R. Hamer
Classic spooky
horror omnibus film from Ealing Studios with contributions from four notable directors
from their famed team. Basil Dearden handles the framing story, which is
remarkable in its own right, with architect Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns)
arriving at Pilgrim’s Farm but feeling a pronounced sense of dejá vu which only
increases when he goes inside and sees a small group gathered. Soon, he
realises that he is remembering a dream and goes on to prognosticate about events
that will soon happen (and, of course, they do). One of the group is a
psychiatrist who plays the role of Doubting Thomas throwing cold water on the
idea of premonitions. But each of the characters then proceeds to tell a story
about their own brush with the supernatural (each story showcased by a
different director). Dearden begins with
a short story about a race car driver who receives a warning about his own
death (“room for one more inside, sir!”) which allows him to avoid it. Then, with
Calvacanti in the director’s chair, young Sally tells of her encounter with a
young boy (while playing hide-and-seek) who turns out to be a murdered ghost. Next,
Googie Withers stars in Robert Hamer’s tale of a haunted mirror that curses her
husband. After this rather harrowing tale, a bit of light relief: Charles Crichton
directs Naughton & Wayne (famous for their roles in Hitchcock’s The Lady
Vanishes, 1938) as a pair of golfers who use 18-holes match-play do decide who
will win the lady they both adore. The loser commits suicide and becomes a
ghost who ineptly haunts his former friend. And then the most famous of tales
(by Calvacanti again) features Michael Redgrave as a ventriloquist at odds with
his dummy. This might be the one to give
you nightmares, if you are small.
Finally, we return again to the framing story and its haunting
conclusion. If you love the sort of uncanny horror that leaves you with a weird
suspicion that the world is far stranger than we think, then I highly recommend
this masterpiece.
Whenever I revisit
The Birds, I find myself somewhat genuinely surprised again that it is much
weirder and slower than I remembered. This isn’t a movie where the heroes successfully
battle a creature that may attack at any time but instead it features an
ominous change in the world where nature has turned against humans. But why? Seemingly the birds have turned
against us at random, although many writers point at Melanie Daniels (Tippi
Hedren) as potentially responsible. After all, her wayward prank – lying to
Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) and then bringing him lovebirds (in a cage, of
course) – seems to have set something off (although gulls were amassing in the
San Francisco skies even before this incident). She is also wounded somehow, abandoned by her
mother and in need of love – from Mitch or from _his_ mother Lydia (Jessica
Tandy) who is distant and suspicious. Poor Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette),
Mitch’s former flame, is sidelined but doesn’t seem to hold any animosity toward
the others (that might be the source of any negative energy riling up the
birds). Hitch himself provided a hint when he suggested the film was about “complacency”
(according to Robin Wood). Have humans cordoned themselves off from nature,
creating comfortable safe routines and habitats for ourselves? Or worse, have
our practices compromised nature itself, such that it needs to fight back? I’m
not suggesting Hitch was an environmentalist but, seen today, the selfish
preoccupations of Melanie, Mitch, Lydia, and Annie clearly pale in comparison
to the wider problems the world faces.
It’s no wonder the birds are pissed off.
And, yes, if you are looking to see birds swoop down on children, tear
at people’s flesh with their beaks, and gouge out their eyes, you’ll find it
here too.
Exceedingly
creepy, even gruesome, film (although with really very little blood and gore)
that explores the complicated emotions of a (clearly immoral and possibly mad) doctor
(Pierre Brasseur) who is desperately seeking a breakthrough in skin-grafting technology
to assist him in a face-transplant for his terribly disfigured twenty-something
daughter, Christiane (Edith Scob), whose emotions are also explored. With the help
of his nurse-assistant (Alida Valli), herself a recipient of a prior skin-graft
(and therefore indebted to him), the doctor kidnaps young women and surgically removes
their faces for transplanting to his daughter (a procedure that the donor does
not always survive). Between surgeries (which often fail), Christiane wanders
the doctor’s mansion in an expressionless white mask, adding a surreal and
dreamlike quality to the proceedings. Increasing the anxiety level of viewers
(and characters in the film), the doctor keeps a kennel full of dogs for his
experiments in the basement whose constant barking provides a soundtrack (when
Maurice Jarre’s weird circus-like music isn’t playing). But soon, the police are closing in and the
gig is up … or is it? With beautiful and
stark black and white cinematography by Eugen Schüfftan (who won the Oscar for
The Hustler, 1961, the next year), this was the high-water mark for director Georges
Franju (although I also recommend his remake of the silent serial Judex, 1963).
Guaranteed to unsettle.
Exceptionally mythic
(or legendary) and drawn from the same texts that inspired Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, Robert Eggers’ film takes place in the late 9th century
somewhere in present day Scandinavia (“Raven Island” and later Iceland). Academic
historians contributed some insights to the production. As the story opens, we
see King Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke) returning from battle to his family,
Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman) and son Amleth (Oscar Novak). Amleth is now to be
initiated into the rites of manhood as heir apparent. However, only a short
while after the mystic and private ceremony, Auvandil is killed by his own
brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang) while Amleth escapes alone in a rowboat. Fast
forward a couple of decades and Amleth (now Alexander Skarsgård) has joined the
bear-wolf tribe as a rampaging berserker. After assailing a Slav village, he hears
that Fjölnir has lost his kingdom and fled to Iceland – he stows away, pretending
to be a slave (along with actual slave and later love interest Olga, played by
Anya Taylor-Joy) on a ship bound for Fjölnir’s lands. Upon arrival, he stays undercover, assessing
the situation (including his mother’s cozy set-up with Fjölnir) before deciding
how to act out his revenge. Undoubtedly an Eggers film (he also made The Witch,
2015, and The Lighthouse, 2019), this would have looked amazing on the big
screen with its epic landscapes, period settings, fire and fury. But it is the
mystic feel that really elevates the picture into something special, beyond
your typical Hollywood blockbuster. The camera glides into some weird spaces,
acknowledges Björk to be a Seeress (and Willem Dafoe to be a Fool), and makes
you feel as though you are there, really in the Viking Age, dirty, obligated to
Norse gods, and facing a nasty, brutish, and short life. The only real demerit
that this film earns is its rather single-minded (and occasionally glacial)
procession from revenge desired to revenge completed – it’s awesome to witness
but, somehow, I expected things to be less on the nose. However, that may grant
it that legendary quality and I guess fate is inexorable after all.
I return to
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s tale of dread more often than many other J-Horror films from
two decades ago. Sure, it is dated – just one look at the Windows operating
system or mobile phones tells you that – but its themes are still universal (if
running particularly deep in Japan). After a brief opening on the open sea with
Captain Kôji Yakusho (a foreshadow of the film’s end), we meet Michi (Kumiko
Asô) and Junko (Kurume Arisaka) who work in a garden store and are concerned
about one of their co-workers who hasn’t shown up to work for a while. When Michi
visits him, he abruptly commits suicide – and then disappears, leaving only a
black mark on the wall and some weird images on his computer. Next, we meet
Kawashima (Haruhiko Katô) who is interested in learning about the internet –
and lands on a website that asks, “Would you like to meet a ghost?” (the film’s
tagline); he quickly shuts down the computer and seeks help from the university’s
computer lab, staffed by Harue (Koyuki). Eventually, these two pairs of young
people discover “the forbidden room” – entered by a doorway edged by red tape
and possessed of some creepy dead souls. In fact, there may be more than one
forbidden room; a grad student argues that too many people have died since the
start of time and now the souls are seeping back into our world, particularly
in these isolated places. But it is the living who seem to be suffering from
loneliness and isolation just as much as these lonely dead and that is Kurosawa’s
key theme; perhaps he was prescient in pointing to the (then incipient)
internet as a wellspring of alienation rather than connection. Yet, as the
world falls apart – and the apocalypse is not far off here – the survivors are
those who manage to overcome their insecurities and team up. But getting to this conclusion requires
viewers to endure some really creepy scenes.
Director Masaki Kobayashi
followed up his triumph Hara-Kiri (1962) with this film drawn from Lafcadio
Hearn’s book of Japanese folktales, Kwaidan (1904), which included many tales
of yokai and ghosts. The most famous are probably “Yuki Onna” (Woman of the
Snow) and “Mimi-nashi Hōichi” (Hoichi the Earless), both included here along
with two other tales “Black Hair” and “In a Cup of Tea”. The film is notable
for its astounding art direction – entirely artificial and studio-bound – but
it is admittedly slow (too slow for kids). As Ayako pointed out, it isn’t
exactly horror either but rather sad stories with spooky elements. The first
three tales take place in the samurai era. “Black Hair” finds an ambitious young man
leave his wife (who works as a weaver) to take up a position working for the
local lord – he remarries to afford himself a better social position. But he is
unhappy and years later returns to his first wife who lives in the same house
and seemingly hasn’t aged (a warning sign!). “Yuki Onna” stars Tatsuya Nakadai
as a woodcutter who gets lost in a snowstorm with his elderly partner; they
take refuge in an old hut whereupon a mysterious woman/demon descends upon them,
stealing the old man’s breath and forcing the younger one (Nakadai) to swear
never to tell another soul or suffer the same consequences. “Hoichi the Earless”
recounts the story of a blind cleric who is bewitched by a clan of ghosts to
sing the epic tale of their last sea battle night after night; when the head
priest discovers this, they cover Hoichi from head to toe with protective spells
-- but they miss two spots. Finally, “In a Cup of Tea”, takes place later in
1904, showing a writer who sees the image of another man in his tea, eventually
drinking it anyway, whereupon the ghostly man’s retainers show up to fight him.
We have the original Criterion DVD which is apparently a 161-minute cut but
newer releases run an even longer 183 minutes.
From the famed
production stable of Val Lewton and directed by Jacques Tourneur comes this
haunting tale of voodoo in the Caribbean. Although apparently drawn from a
non-fiction report, screenwriters Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray tack on elements
of Jane Eyre to give the film more dramatic tension and mystery. Frances Dee
stars as a Betsy Connell, a Canadian nurse hired to look after a mentally ill patient
on the island of San Sebastian (probably Haiti) by her husband Paul Holland
(Tom Conway). Mrs Holland is completely zombified but can walk around in a
trance. Upon arrival, Betsy meets Paul’s
younger half-brother Wes Rand (James Ellison) and soon learns that he was
having an affair with Mrs Holland which was discovered by Paul. The shock
apparently led to Jessica Holland’s illness and Wes’s subsequent
alcoholism. After Betsy’s attempts to
revive Jessica with an insulin shock fail, she is convinced by her maid (Theresa
Harris) to try voodoo. This leads to the
most spooky scenes in the picture, as Betsy walks with zombie Jessica to the
crossroads and beyond to voodoo headquarters (the houmfort) – along the way
they see creepy Darby Jones, the zombie who guards the crossroads. Little does
she know that Paul and Wes’s mother, Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett), has been
masquerading as the voice of the voodoo spirits at the Houmfort (in order to
convince the locals to adopt modern medicine). Yet what seems to throw cold
water on the possibility that voodoo is real is quickly undone by the script,
which proceeds to a tragic ending in which characters act by ambiguous
compulsions. Mysterious and beautiful.
I don’t usually go
for movies with gore or slasher-type killers but writer-director Dario Argento
brought something different to horror in the 1970s. Influenced by Mario Bava,
Argento uses garishly coloured sets and lighting and takes the giallo (Italian
pulp mystery fiction) as his genre of choice. But with Suspiria, Argento moved
more clearly into supernatural territory. Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) is the
American ballet student who arrives in Germany to study at the Tanz Academy led
by headmistress Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett, star of many Fritz Lang films of
the ‘40s) and strict teacher Miss Tanner (Alida Valli, star of The Third Man
and Hitchcock’s Paradine Case in the ‘40s). She arrives on a rainy night and
sees another student fleeing the school (subsequently murdered). Although she originally wishes to stay
off-campus, after a strange hallway encounter that leaves her woozy, she is
moved to a room in the main building with the other students, including Sara (Stefania
Casini), who becomes an ally. Argento
uses weird camera angles and tracking shots to add to the ominous feel of the
place (and a maggot infestation makes it worse). Rumours swirl and eventually Suzy
heads to the local psychiatric hospital/university to ask about witchcraft (to
a sadly dubbed Udo Kier). What she learns makes her even more suspicious about
the leaders of the dance academy, particularly when Sara disappears. Of course,
we soon discover that witchcraft is real but Argento manages the mystery
elements of the plot expertly (a talent he was later to lose), even as the
whole thing resembles a dream… or nightmare.
A spooky masterpiece elevated by an amazing score by the rock band
Goblin but punctuated with some bloody violent set-pieces (enter at your own risk!).
The 2018 remake with Tilda Swinton pales in comparison but is altogether a
different beast.
I read H. G. Wells’
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) in my teens, although I barely remember it
now. The film hones in on the horror in the story rather than on the more
philosophical inclinations of the author (dealing with the theory of evolution,
animal ethics, etc.) and, for this reason, Wells apparently was not a fan of
the adaptation by screenwriters Waldemar Young and Philip Wylie. Yet the film, as directed by Erle C. Kenton,
is truly horrific – with no constraints placed by censors (the film is “pre-code”),
a palpably decadent weirdness pervades the proceedings. Of course, there is an
assortment of half-beast/half-human oddities (with excellent make-up) on the
Island, created via sadistic experimentation by Doctor Moreau (played by
Charles Laughton in a gleefully leering and cruel performance), that evokes not
only dread and disgust but sympathy for their horrible plight. Shipwrecked
Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) gradually discovers the evil goings-on and is
shocked when he realises that Moreau has attempted to manipulate him into
providing evidence for whether the half-beasts can procreate with humans (as
well as speak/learn/and follow the Law). Lota, the Panther Woman (played by
Kathleen Burke, who won a contest by Paramount to star in the film), is the
target (and in true pre-code fashion, she is scantily clad and the target of
the camera’s male gaze) and, despite his fiancée, Parker almost seems to give
in. But when said fiancée actually arrives on the island to rescue him, with a
sea captain in tow, Moreau tries to turn his beasts against them, causing them
to violate his Law (no killing, no walking on all fours, etc.), and therefore also
to realise that there is nothing stopping them from killing Moreau himself,
which they do. (Spoiler). The film is all humid tropical jungle, shrouded in
fog and silence (no musical soundtrack) save for the cry of the beasts in the
House of Pain. A strange artefact from
another time and place.
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