The Curse of the Crying Woman (1963)

 

Director: Rafael Baledón

Screenplay: Rafael Baledón and Fernando Galiana

Cast: Rosita Arenas as Amelia, Abel Salazar as Jaime, Rita Macedo as Selma, Carlos López Moctezuma as Juan, Enrique Lucero as Dr. Daniel Jaramillo

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Moody atmosphere immediately introduces you to this Mexican horror film, referring to the legend of La Llorona, a vengeful ghost who mourned the children she drowned, in a rage due to her husband's infidelity, at bodies of water whilst being a symbol of death or misfortune who hear her weeping. Be it 1933's La Llorona, or The Curse of La Llorona (2019) for the US film industry, this figure has returned over and over the decades, and here in a period drama, we immediately see an alternative take on her as an evil figure. A horse drawn carriage with two men and a young woman make the ill advised decision to drive in the middle of the night in an area where murders have been credited to a beast, and in reality, it is a knife throwing older man, with throttling hands of steel, and his mistress he works under who are the real threat. They neither waste time killing the occupants and draining all the blood from their victims.

This immediately points to a huge virtue of Rafael Baledón's film. The law are naturally concerned it is a madman without real knowledge of the culprits, whilst the film does not hide from the viewers that Aunt Selma (Rita Macedo) is the same person from this prologue, awaiting her niece Amelia (Rosita Arenas) to visit her, on the eve of Amelia's birthday, that naturally plays an integral part of the narrative. A piece of pure Gothic cinema, of an old mansion and a fog shrouded dark nights, it is the worst place for our lead and her husband to be, especially obvious when the mirrors are all covered up, which should be an immediate alarm bell. It is also a delight for a film not to waste time with pointless mystery - we know from get-go the place is cursed, and the greater concern is having found yourself stuck there trying to survive as her aunt wants Amelia to help resurrect the Crying Woman.

The resulting work is a haunted house in filmic form in the best of ways, cobwebbed cellars with torture devices and ghouls on pulleys charging to the camera. Cool production design is here in swathes - corpses attached to wheels of torture, rubber bats, or the cutest rats possibly seen in a horror film in the foreground even if they are meant to represent decay.  Madame Marina, the Crying Woman, is the decayed figure on the wheel of torture here, a figure who sacrificed people for magical powers and who Selma's late husband was researching. She is not even hiding to her niece Amelia that she is taken Marina's lead for power too. Obviously, this is all a metaphor for the idea of trying to cheat death and the immortality that can come from this, to cheat death by sacrificing others. It is an obvious story trope, and honestly a conservative way of seeing things, as horror over the decades has been complicated by stories, even if comedic, which offer witches to vampires to be actually nice people and potentially immortal. A much more interesting modern reading is to interpret Selma as representing a blinded devote who is trying to convince her niece to join a cult, even if it means sacrificing others and her own empathy.

There is also a literal curse where, even with the conclusion of this, the story leaves Amelia with the sense that nothing will be the same for her, adding the more tantalizing and spooky undercurrent to the plot. The set up with Amelia being convinced by Selma to help is a ghoulish mortality tale with the additional advantage that director Rafael Baledón will bring in moments to make an already sumptuous looking period horror film have memorable scenes. Be it German expressionist touches, like the night sky suddenly becoming glaring eyes when Amelia may be turning into a Crying Woman, or the flashback to Selma's past done in reverse negative images, the film is giving an incredible style to what is a rollicking spectacle. It is the kind of production with this careful sense of being well made with a sense of fun, where in that flashback we get a random wolf man in a suit, with no further context, just to add spice to the proceedings without feeling pointlessly random.

This is also factoring in that The Curse of the Crying Woman is still a gruesome film decades after its creation, such as the man left decrepit and incarcerated in a jail cell to be continually punished, only to finally get his revenge on his captor. Or dogs sent to maul police officers even if, cutely, they were clearly shot in some images encouraged to lick a glass screen which the camera is behind to represent rabid dog attacks. It still has a sickly sense of the macabre even in the non-gruesome scenes like this to its advantage. Even on a base pleasure level, with the roof literally coming down in the finale, this older film gets far more spectacle and shock into its length than films made decades later that could have the gore and perversion, but wasted time on plot padding and a lack of style, whilst this flexes its production muscles spectacularly. Its director Rafael Baledón was a veteran of countless genres - comedy to luchador films - with the advantage he had been an actor too, which allowed him to engage with his casts. He was also a prominent figure in Mexican horror cinema, and it is clear with this film alone he had the right idea of how to treat them in productions style and without losing his audience in dull exposition.

The Last Matinee (2020)

 

a.k.a. Al morir la matinée

Director: Maximiliano Contenti

Screenplay: Manuel Facal and Maximiliano Contenti

Cast: Luciana Grasso as Ana, Ricardo Islas as Asesino Come Ojos, Julieta Spinelli as Angela, Franco Durán as Tomás, Pedro Duarte as Mauricio, Yuly Aramburu as Maria Julia, Hugo Blandamuro as Hugo, Daiana Carigi as Maite

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

From Uruguay, this film is absolutely the creation of a director, Maximiliano Contenti, who loves horror films, and wanted to create a film in tribute to giallo and slasher films he has likely seen. As I will also nod to, as his filmography include non-horror films including documentary work on subjects like the Uruguayan jazz scene, this is a beautiful example of someone from a country whose cinema that is sadly ignored in the West bringing their own voice to the proceedings. "Beautiful" may be inappropriate for a film about a psychopath who kills is victims and steals their eyeballs, but as he is gleefully riffing on films which he proudly nods to in the film posters of The Last Matinee's central location, Contenti is still making a film as a Uruguayan creator and adding to the horror canon alongside the likes of The Silent House (2010).

As a premise, it is an easy one to start with for this Uruguayan-Argentinean co-production, that just when you think it's safe to go to a cinema, there is a serial killer in the aisles. Set in the capital of Uruguay, Montevideo, in 1993 on a rainy day, a mysterious man in black gloves eating the last pickle from a giant jar enters a cinema for its last screening of the night, all with terrible intent for his bloodlust and obsession with collecting eyeballs in that aforementioned jar. Already from the prologue, you get a good glimpse of the style of the proceedings. From the colour palette - bold primaries for a bag of sweets a kid leaving accidentally spills to the murky yellow walls on the stairway - to the neon, the world depicted is stylistic in an engaging way. The score, by Hernán González, fully nods to the fact this is a throwback tribute to older films Contenti has seen, evoking giallo and slasher films as a huge influence whilst being a tribute that helps the movie to have a distinct style.

The set up for potential victims is that Ana (Luciana Grasso) visits the cinema to greet her dad, only to be stuck taking the shift as the projectionist as her father is not medically okay to be doing ten plus hour shifts in the booth. Other characters among this slasher set -up is the kid who managed to stay behind to watch an illicit horror movie he is too young to see, the male and female couple who are awkwardly dating, the young adults already drunk on vodka outside, a girl called "Brooke Shields" in her attractiveness, and the old man who refuses to leave or pay because, out of reality, he believes he has already seen the films. With a real film playing within this one in a nice touch, Frankenstein: Day of the Beast (2011) with its director Ricardo Islas playing the killer himself, there is the growing tension as this figure is seemingly able to pick victims off in staff and patrons with the sick obsession with scoping their eyeballs out for trophies.

It is a really cool idea - horror films have metatextual nodded to their existence, and Contenti has a poster for one, Bigas Luna's Anguish (1987), which was famous for its scenes in a movie theatre, prominent in scenes alongside his first ever feature film Muñeco Viviente V (2008) and Dario Argento's Opera (1987). Unlike, say, Lamberto Bava's Demons (1985) however, which was a deliberately over-the-top film even in the horror canon, the tone is imagining a place in the dark or with people distracted where someone is carefully eliminating patrons quietly without anyone noticing. The film is more exaggerated than this, but this does provide a slow burn pace even within what is a pure style-for-style-sake horror tribute. It takes a while for actual gruesomeness to transpire, when two people get a spike between them to make their kiss more memorable, upping the violence and gore stakes, but the film is helped so much more because we are even setting up the small story beforehand. These characters get to exist to be someone rather than just pure cannon fodder, which was a problem you do find with a lot of original slashers where victims barely get any time to make their demises punch you in the gut. There is at least a sense of tragedy when people are killed here, even as archetypes, due to this pacing choice.

Also, even if confined to said cinema, it is already a pleasure to see a film from Uruguay just in terms of how the cast talk to each other, even the diegetic sound of cinema adverts and decor to set up the time period. Later in his career, Maximiliano Contenti would make another film about the capital of Montevideo, Hot Club de Montevideo (2023), a documentary about the titular club opened in 1950 dedicated to having jazz performed. That one detail really does suggest a great deal about him as a creator, how The Last Matinee itself like quite a few modern horror films is a tribute to the past. In terms to the choice of chronological setting, beyond removing mobile phones from the plot line, it also feels like a time, set in 1993, when he would have been around the age to have already been bitten by the bug of horror cinema in general as a man born in 1984. Even casting Ricardo Islas as the killer feels like a more profound choice as, whilst the flood gates for horror from Uruguay definitely grew from The Silent House onwards, some of the earliest from the eighties onwards were Ricardo Islas' own directorial work, making him a pioneer whose casting here feels even more beautiful as a nod of respect of his career as an innovator. Again, when he gets to eat an eyeball at one point and menace a child, that may not seem appropriate to use the term "beautiful" for, but with my admiration for The Last Matinee for these reasons, and also being a great piece of pure piece of ghoulish horror film making, it works in an appropriately perverse way.

Science Crazed (1991)

 

Director: Ron Switzer

Screenplay: Ron Switzer

Cast: Cameron Scholes; Tony Della Ventura as The 'Fiend'; Robin Hartsell

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)  /An Abstract Film Candidate

 

I Suggest nerve gas tests in the following countries...[Long pause] France...[Even longer pause]...Canada...

 

Where did this Canadian SOV film come from? Chronologically even Science Crazed's date of birth is confusion. Some say 1991, others 1989 thus making it a film from the year of my birth, and I have belief it was at least shot in 1987 or around that period, due to a Toronto telephone directory book and how, with all the horror posters on the walls, some like Evil Dead 2 (1987) and Creepshow 2 (1987) time stamp the period. What cannot be denied that, between this and Things (1989), Canada in its dips into micro-budget cinema could get weird, Science Crazed one of those true oddities from this world with the added strangeness of disembodied voices, strange pacing and random tangents.

The notoriety of this film is immediately established when you notice how everything is s-l-o-w. Not Leonardo DiCaprio reduced to a bag of meat crawling to his car due to out-of-date Quaaludes as in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), nor even slow minimalist cinema, but a perplexing one-off form of minimalism. Half suspecting, with a shot of a book on Hegel on the left and a horror book on the right of the table, this was made on purpose like this at times, and at other times clearly by accident and by an unknown psychological influence. The opening is full of pregnant pauses, as a doctor researching a serum that causes quick pregnancies is told by the board funding him to stop the research, represented by one man. Both have dubbed over post-synch voices. The doctor, rocking sunglasses, still continues the experiment with a willing female subject where, in exactly three hours, she will become pregnant, and in twenty one hours, give birth. The unfortunate issue of a bloody aftermath transpires where the woman dies, and the male and female assistants have to cover up the incident whilst keeping the baby. Said baby gestates, rapidly, into a full grown man with a bloody bandaged head, elf ears, a bloodied white shirt and jeans, and a taste for strangling random people to death including the doctor himself, unhappy about his existence.

Science Crazed takes a very simple premise and runs it into a form of ultra minimalism. Said son, looking like Marlon Brandon in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) after a horrifying shaving accident, making insanely deep breathing noises (especially in how they are mixed on the soundtrack among the disembodied and repeated synth) and drags himself along with a lame leg. Anyone, anyone, he encounters he chokes, sometimes with one hand, and kills in his random path in a building complex which is a stand in for a lab and a variety of environments. Science Crazed for those who know it is notorious for its strange narcoleptic tone, the set up a traditional one for any horror, only to drift off between the VHS hiss silence between music strings. It is a film set in its own world of logic due to budgetary restrictions - when the cocky detective is called at a Video Shed rental store, looking at a Rambo VHS tape, and takes the call as if at a police station whilst the clerk makes funny faces during the conversation. And of course, the film places its gonads on the table by how extreme this gets through a ten minute exercise sequence. It is what this sentence suggests - two woman, one in a pink tutu whilst the other in a form fitting piece, exercising in-between shots of the monster limping along in a corridor for what does last ten minutes of running time. Maybe because I was prepared for this notorious sequence, it did not beat me down, and was amusing instead, but it is literally the scene that makes or breaks a viewer's experience because it early on in the production. It warns you how more random, and how prolonged and dragged out, the film will get.

It is abstract? Science Crazed does eventually ware you down into a daze, as in terms of a plot, it is barely one baring the detective and the doctor's assistances tracking the Fiend down. The production feels improvised but in a peculiar way as a result. You can struggle in padding out a film, as has been found in micro-budget genre cinema, but how does one explain the scene where a woman, behind a desk, says extremely slowly with length pauses names of countries to start nerve gas tests in, which is never explained or elaborated upon, baring that it is the definition of random improvisation? Or the prolonged scene that does make sense in context, but lingers, of a woman approaching the Fiend calmly in a room with silhouettes drawn on the white wall, caressing the heavily breathing monster for a prolonged moment, avant garde film levels in pace, all for a backbreaking bear hug as a receipt? Or the other woman with a very Canadian accent, as the camera spins around her in the dark, speaking to herself (without sound) in prayer despite looking like an eighties day glow punkette? The accidental minimalism of this monster film is its own strange experience.

The film in its final act, by the time the fiend has terrorised an indoor swimming pool with wooden panelling, does feel the burden of its weight if you cannot engage with its tone, as liable as it did when I first saw the film to cause the viewer to drift off into the visuals. Ultimately, between this and Things, Things is so consistently strange that you do keep alert once you understand its logic. Science Crazed in its own way is just as fascinating, but in terms of being a film that is a repetition of shots, of the fiend limping along or watching bystanders at the swimming pool, which are stretched out to an extreme. Not a lot actually happens in terms of a film, one which could have been less the sixty minutes or shorter, and as a result it is closer to a monster film distorted beyond recognition. Even for a horror fan, there is not a lot of the luridness of gore either and any practical effects, barring some fake blood, with a lot of the film following an old b-movie trope of a monster strangling a person, sometimes with one hand, which is very easy to act out but for most people is usually a sign of a terrible horror film. It is an acquired taste.

As a film openly hostile to a conventional viewing experience, this is in itself strange and unconventional, which is, ultimately, why it has developed the reputation over a decade it has. It is abstract though? There are as potentially strange concoctions done on purpose you could imagine - if Michael Snow, the Canadian avant-garde film maker, or a slow cinema director had helmed a b-movie horror film but kept in Bela Tarr length long takes. One can imagine, shot from a distance the exercise sequence, in a one take ten minute sequence, in real time before a monster killed the participants, and whilst not for everyone, that would have been memorable in the annuals of horror cinema in itself. Science Crazed itself, for all the moments clearly intentional in structure, is not intentional at other times, and thus is something else, and part of its legacy as an obscure oddity, which is the entire micro-budget genre where some due to their form and budgetary restrictions leads to perplexing distortions in audio-visual content as much as ones which fully succeed. Many, frankly, most people would not find appealing in the slightest; however for someone like me, whether shot on videotape camera or a digital one from the early 2000s, with just limited resources, they seem to exist in their own little worlds with their own rules that are compelling to witness and their own form of abstraction. That the film promised a sequel in the end credits, the "Revenge of the "Fiend"" is almost a cherry on top to this particular example. That, with its director having disappeared entirely, it is the ultimate what-if mystery of what the blue hell a sequel to Science Crazed would have turned out like if he kept making films.

Abstract Spectrum: Minimalist/Psychotronic/Random/Slow

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

The Substance (2024)

Director: Coralie Fargeat

Screenplay: Coralie Fargeat

Cast: Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, Margaret Qualley as Sue, Dennis Quaid as Harvey, Gore Abrams as Oliver, Hugo Diego Garcia as Diego, Phillip Schurer as Mr. Scream, Joseph Balderrama as Craig Silver

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

The best opening to this review came from the male cinema usher introducing this film. In my sickest glee, but sincerely as well for its director-writer Coralie Fargeat, this film has reached a wide audience for a director whose debut was only the film before Revenge (1917), a subversion of the controversial rape-revenge genre from the French director who worked on short films beforehand.  Her follow-up The Substance, seven years later, could be seen in multiplexes like the Odeon here in the United Kingdom, but I found it more practical to go to a boutique cinema. Even if part of a trend to sell cinemas as an experience, with more lavish food options and the ability to order for this or the bar during the opening trailers per screening, it allows one a little bit more access to more non-mainstream films, and the ability to sit on comfy sofas which, even as someone who doesn't mind the traditional cinema seats, I can live more with. This also allows the experiences to have greater weight, in the additional details such as staff that are friendly and seem to enjoy their work. You can learn of the patron, because they accidentally didn't get a spoon, eating their ice cream with their hands than asking for a utensil, or that this friendliness added the best punch line for The Substance where the male usher, a guy who clearly went to the gym but with our British sense of affability, warned the patron. That, if anyone came here to see the film for its buzz but didn't see the trailer or knew it was a body horror movie, they were in for something unexpected. I was aware, and warned myself, but didn't expect how The Substance turned out to be either, so that warning even added a punch line for me to make the viewing experience even better, something you wouldn't have gotten at a multiplex.

The Substance came from a Cannes Film Festival in 2024 which helped me feel reinvigorated in being a cineaste after a sense of malaise and personal depression which pushed me out of going to the cinema often for near three years. It was among a list of films just in the official competition, even if contentious in reaction like Francis Ford-Coppola's Megalopolis (2024), which all felt they were made with a sense of them being films made individuals who desired to bring their premises to the screen, films which even if a few were miserable failures would linger in memory and worth preserving, in the ideal if they all had virtues, years after. The Substance had an additional layer, in not only a body horror genre film getting into the Official Competition, but how it was the "return" for Demi Moore, the Hollywood actress of St. Elmo's Fire (1985) to G.J. Jane (1997) taking a bold step into this genre. The film itself is proudly of its body horror mould, which is something spectacular if needs to be considered in how, with a lot of mainstream publications covering the film because of Moore, there was a lot of eyes on a filmmaker whose first film caught the attention for genre and horror fans more. For starters, there is the danger to oversimplify its themes of objectification and commercialisation of women's bodies, and especially in terms of youth, as the film complicates it. Misogyny and these ideals are the catalyst to the film's main plot, where former film star and TV exercise show host Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) is fired from her career by Dennis Quaid's grotesque TV station executive for being over her fifties, wishing to replace her with a new, nubile female host who is to be between twenty to thirty. There is however a lot more nuisance that can be lost if we just jump on the themes as they are without taking in what Fargeat also as the screenwriter adds to complicate this.

The objectification by creepy old men, or Quaid eating shrimp in one of the grossest moments in a film where someone regurgitates a breast, is just the push into a work with more complexity as Sparkle finds herself after a car crash introduced to the titular substance, a toxic green chemical which duplicates a younger version of herself dubbed Sue (Margaret Qualley) from her own body. It becomes as much her own conflict with her age and body dysmorphia, with even the broad caricatures of Quaid and most of the male cast telling within itself. It is a film of sleekness, with a bouncy Hi-RNG score by Raffertie and bold primary colours. Fargeat as a female director, who also co-edited the film to have the intensity of cuts as this film can  also have, crosses a line too that would be rightly criticised from male filmmakers of fetishising Qualley's body including her lips, let alone the nudity, in lurid close-ups. There are layers of pop artificiality here that even extends to the depiction of misogyny, where the TV executive's gross gender objectification is so comically ridiculous, with the finale at a New Years Eve TV show with kids in the audience yet nude exotic dangers onstage, that the caricatures in generally show how old and prehistoric these ideas are, to the point these weird gender beliefs of women come off more twisted for how ridiculous they are. Most of the men come off as immature children who never grew up in their beliefs in women, and in a world where a political figure like JD Vance rightly get hung and drawn online for old comments about "crazy cat ladies" not deserving political influence, the kind of thing you would expect from immature boys that thought cooties were real, you see how this attitude to sexism from men needs to be spoofed like this to get the point more sharply across than take it as severely.

A sincere "feminist" story of objectification would be useless, and digested in empty think pieces, where a film this more complicated in tone and proudly embracing the explicit practical effects forces you to think a lot more hard. Because it was more an explicit horror film, with the ending matching the likes of Society (1989) and Screaming Mad George's infamous "shunting" practical effects in terms of eyebrow raising sights, there was a danger of this being dismissed, but the fact that it managed to find itself in this interesting place as a big new film for 2024, with a significant choice as its female lead, without losing that edge. It is among those interesting "art house horror films" I always love, but this is the first one where, rather than David Cronenberg eventually, the tone eventually starts to fold its serious themes not in subtle moments of introspection, but the exaggerated perverseness that you would more likely find in a Street Trash (1987) on a significantly higher budget, those crop of divisive and lurid films' attitude to jaw dropping and gross visual spectacle, alongside the poppy and at times flair to the images, being used to convey the serious message that this has. This takes infamous moments like the "shunting" of Society, the man melting into a toilet in Street Trash or the fetishishtic body prosthetics of so many eighties horror films, including Cronenberg films despite their moments of cerebral coldness, to this really uncomfortable idea of women being objectified and objectifying themselves, not playing it safe when it can be so easy, as I could accidentally have done as a male viewer, to have a cretinous and oversimplify view which would be offensive to female viewers who could find so much more nuisance in the material.

It was a newspaper piece, a Guardian interview with Demi Moore herself for the film, which gave the film more weight when I eventually saw the film¹. She came to The Substance with no knowledge of the body horror genre¹, but developed an interest with the subject for reasons which added interesting flourishes to her performance and the final film which I kept in mind for the viewing. One of the most prominent is how this becomes a war between the older Elizabeth Sparkle and her young idealised self Sue as the story progresses, with Moore noting how even if with the chance to relive a better life as a young woman again, Sue takes the job as the new sexy aerobic star and kowtows to the same misogynistic creeps who fired Sparkle in the first place, happy to such up to the same people for a sliver of attention. The Substance itself, playing into the central conflict, is promoted by the unseen creators' advertising with the caveat that even if two people are created from the cell duplication process, they are the same person and should not forget this. They must have seven days each per their rotas, with the other staying in a semi coma with food intravenously sustaining them and the spinal fluid of Elizabeth required to keep Sue stabilised. Even with this distinct logic, playing into an aesthetic of a new anti-aging cosmetic with the substance's slick and minimalistic packaging, there is a more arcane nature to the premise. I can easily imagine this as an old fairy tale from old Europe, where even if cultural and time differences were to be found, themes even if added with future audience perspective visible within the central theme of how, like so many fairy tales and Monkey's Paw/morality horror stories, the downfall is rarely because the magical/unnatural item is inherently the cause, but because it eventually gets abused or the worst sides of people ruin the balance.

This is where a psychological edge plays out where the real horror lies in the schism in Elizabeth's mind, the idea Sue is still her even if they seemingly are different people. A story exists where she and Sue can co-exist, can defy natural laws of aging, and have a happy conclusion, but the conflict and the horror of this genre film itself, even if spurned by the misogyny of men and ageism, is the self inflicted desire for personal attention Sparkle was infected with when she came into stardom and could not purge herself of when the fame ends. Her younger self, as Demi Moore realised in that Guardian interview, is trapped in the need for fame and glamour, willing to still follow the empty lifestyle and praises of gross old men, and in her need to do so, starts to abuse the contract to the point it physically starts to age Elizabeth. The real horror here, not the icky prosthetics, is when Elizabeth started to feel bored and depressed, jobless, even in a luxury apartment earned from her fame and stuck in front of a TV. Food, one of the few things not considered a taboo like sex, is effectively a more socially acceptable narcotic for depression, and some of the body horror is Coralie Fargeat as much showing its preparation and mess in a grotesque form, including the least expected place a chicken drumstick can be found as a sick gag scene. Those moments, including Elizabeth not finding happiness with the one nice guy, a goofy if sweet older high school friend, when she decides not to go on a date is legitimately sad and the real terror of the film. Stuck with her youth glaring at her outside on a billboard, it uses the lack of subtlety of horror cinema's visual form more effectively, in how youth in culture is used and fetished, turning into a plague for older people to feel trapped within aging bodies.

The film escalates to the absurd levels to contrast this without losing these themes, and this is where I also have to praise the two female leads for their commitment, as The Substance has to juggle these serious moments to the fact both actresses are going to be within extensive prosthetic body suits by the ending. Margaret Qualley was someone I had barely registered in films I had seen before 2024, but argubly 2024 could be her year as an MVP for me, least one of them, in terms of an actor with an incredible range in all four films I have seen in 2024 at the cinema up to The Substance. Including Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things (2023, but January 2024 British theatrical release) and Kind of Kindness (2024), and Ethan Coen's Drive-Away Dolls (2024), within a year I have seen Qualley show a level of elasticity and ability to shift roles within three different directors, from the eccentric accented comedy role with Coen to Lanthimos' idiosyncratic duo, that makes me now want to see her have a successful career with a lot of awards involved. Starting off with a dancer's background and having a link to Hollywood's past, as the daughter of Andie MacDowell, she had started long before 2024, but this is a run of four films that impressed me, more so as with The Substance, you also have to factor in her comfort in being able to do a role as with Sue. Whether in skin-tight Lycra or full nudity, to be able to be hyper-sexualised onscreen would have been a challenge, taking the fake artificiality of her character to its extreme alongside all the primary colours and arch lustiness.

Demi Moore is also taking risks for this too, playing the polar opposite in Elizabeth Sparkle, feeling like an abrupt and amazing inclusion of a huge veteran Hollywood actor in a film with the level of explicitness with full commitment fully felt in her performance, her vulnerability in the Elizabeth character as pointed. There is a shade of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Robert Altman's psychodrama of pitting the real rivalry between an older Betty Davis and Joan Crawford against each other, but unlike the "Hagsploitation" movement which came out of its success, which is dubious in a negative sounding way in how it used older actresses from classic Hollywood cinema, Moore and her character Elizabeth Sparkle are incredibly sympathetic, whilst Margaret Qualley plays the young evil Betty Davis tormenting the older. The one moment where Moore channels a Joan Crawford-like mania, when Sue was already abusing their relationship to harmful effect, is a gleeful moment including its French director-writer mocking her own country's cuisine in a grotesque (and high cholesterol) moment where Moore is almost a cackling witch over pots.

The film, never expecting it with no context before of Fargeat's previous film, goes to a level you normally don't find in Cannes Film Festival competition entries. We have had the controversial films with extreme horror and sexual content, like Lars Von Trier's Antichrist (2009), but after the end credits, I couldn't help but hope somewhere Frank Henenlotter, the director of notorious genre films like Frankenhooker (1990), learnt of this film clearly indebted to his cinema among others, and has been able to see this. As an official selection film of prestige, with Demi Moore of all people in its centre, I hope he was cackling with glee when, without spoiling too much, what could have ended perfectly as a horror anthology story conclusion in its macabre form decided to instead take it further. As I get older, I am starting to love even indulgent movies which break the two hour mark into two and a half, and a horror film at two and a half hours is a rare chimera almost unheard of for the genre. Ninety minutes is usually the golden number for the genre, so those that are longer are fascinating for me to see exist, as they have more time to extend and flesh out their content. Where this extensive length comes from, with spoilers if not to ruin everything, is the appearance of "Monstro Elisasue", the creation of old school prosthetics which almost evokes the ending of Tetsuo The Iron Man (1989) in two characters being melded into one, if here of flesh. There is also a blood geyser of such length and amount this clearly had been indebted, or at least paid tribute to, Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992) for overdoing the fake blood, a film that notoriously left one New Zealand film studio set so stained it lingered in the flooring years after. It is indulgent as hell, and I admit the soundtrack (least in the cinema screening) did become excessively loud to the point of off-putting, but indulgence is acceptable when you bear witness to the final act that ended as it did. The crowd I was with were not really people used to these films - there was shocked laughter, amazement of what they witnessed and likely discussion afterwards in the bar, and even I, already respecting the film, was knocked back that it ended as giddily twisted as it did. The film only won a Best Screenplay award at Cannes in the official competition, but I do see The Substance as being one of the films that will have a lot to be talked onwards. Coralie Fargeat should have had to wait seven years to get the film off the ground, but what the film does when it finally came was an incredible success. It was for the better that the reviews from that initial Cannes festival were way too subdued from the press, and that warning happened just before my cinema viewing from an usher, as they added perverse cherries on this wonderfully gory cake of ideas.

========

1) ‘We can be violent to ourselves. Brutal’: Demi Moore on body image, reinvention and her most shocking role yet, by Charlotte Edwardes for The Guardian, published September 14th 2024.

Vampire Princess Miyu (1988-89)

 

Director: Toshiki Hirano

Screenplay: Shō Aikawa

Based on the manga by Toshiki Hirano and Narumi Kakinouchi

(Voice) Cast: Naoko Watanabe/Anne Marie Zola (Manga UK dub)/Pamela Weidner as Miyu; Mami Koyama/Stephanie Griffin as Himiko Se; Kaneto Shiozawa/Zach Hanner as Larva

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Series)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

The personal project of its director Toshiki Hirano, as he is one of the co-creators of the source manga alongside his wife Narumi Kakinouchi, this definitely wins you over with its style and in terms of its melancholic tone. For the OVA anime period, it stands out for this, if with the issue like a lot of them that this feels slight for a premise which could have been taken further. This is emphasised when you know the original manga, not including the spin-offs, lasted from the year this anime was created to 2002.

Tellingly he would return to this in the late nineties for a full animated television series, but for what we got here, including the episode following the students being turned into marionettes which turned into the most successful story for its tone and emotional turns, I was glad to finally get around to this.

For the full review, follow the link HERE.

Dark Waters (1993)

Director: Mariano Baino

Screenplay: Mariano Baino and Andrew M. Bark

Cast: Louise Salter as Elizabeth, Venera Simmons as Sarah, Maria Kapnist as Mother Superior

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A British-Italian co-production shot between Ukraine and Russia, predominantly in Ukrainian locations, this does follow on from many Italian genre films by the end of the golden era of Italian genre cinema where they were more pronounced in their international productions. Probably the most unconventional I have seen, whilst really obscure, is the action film The Ultimate Mission (1988) starring Mark Gregory, who most will know for 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982), which was shot in North Korea. Dark Waters is something very different from that example, setting itself up as an incredibly atmospheric Lovecraftian-like religious horror tale. This is even established in the prologue, even when set in the daylight, where on an island, a priest nearly drowns only to be impaled in the neck on a statue like in a Lucio Fulci film set piece. A nun sacrifices her life, seemingly pushed off a cliff or jumping off it deliberately, to destroy a demonic talisman. Unfortunately, the pieces are collected back up by the others nuns, and it will come back to haunt the entire environment.

Twenty years later, a young woman named Elizabeth (Louise Salter) goes back to the island where this all transpired, where the convent was being sent payments from her recently passed father. It should immediately set alarm bells for her when she is even about to reach the island, passing hooded monks carrying burning totems in a field at night for one of the first strong images of the production. Not in terms of this writer being anti-religious but, considering what ungodly blasphemy has transpired on that aforementioned island near them, the monks had the hindsight to have the break out the most ominous looking ritual, all to purge any influence creeping inland. To even get to the island, Elizabeth struggling to, the only person with a boat willing to take her on a rainy night is a man explicitly saying he is not afraid of death, and whose closest thing to a cabin boy is a half feral man who eats raw meat straight off the poop deck.

Dark Waters does have some cheese, some slow passages needing to set the plot up, and feels the limitations that literature or a video game could have dealt with. This film has atmosphere through the gills, but unlike those mediums, the issues of limited film budgets or production difficulties can plague cinema, and it feels like Mariano Baino's sole theatrical length work had teething issues off-camera alongside the oppressive nature of the premise. I am fully aware director Baino had a difficult production cycle making Dark Waters, at a cost of the distinct on-location sets in Ukraine which add so much production value, so as much of the issues could have come from this messy cycle. When the film is focused, cutting into Lucio Fulci's more morbidly gorgeous horror movie moments, it really crawls under the skin. The broken talisman established in the prologue, and its connection to an unknown evil of a beast, "the alpha and the omega", leads to a religious convent on the island which has slowly unravelled the longer this beast is there radiating its evil. Something like a whole group of nuns flagellating themselves in the candle lit underground caves is pure Catholic Gothicism, but even without one of the nuns being murdered when investigating the convent, there are clear signs of madness here which make of a lot of the film's best aspects and show more is hidden here for Elizabeth to accidentally find out about.

The beast apparently takes the sight of those who see it, and evoking the ending of Fulci's The Beyond (1981), Elizabeth will encounter a lot of blind individuals, including the matriarch of the nunnery, evoking this alarm. Even when the beast is rendered, if still lovingly, by a rubber monster effect, there are the disturbing sights which are far more potent, such as the image of the beach covered entire in dead fish, never explained but is the type of production detail that adds far more than explicit sights. It is the type of sight, perfectly executed here, where atheists and Christians, even the Satanists, would join forced to stop the influence causing it, and a huge virtue and the most disturbing parts of Dark Waters are the slowly creeping dread than the explicit horror. As Elizabeth slowly regains her memories of the island, having been born there, the filming locations add a great deal to the production as does the almost atonal score by Igor Clark, catching you off guard at times with its hair rising and at times unpredictable spikes in the soundtrack.

As Elizabeth realises her direct connection to the beast, even if the practical effects for once are more ridiculous for the tone, the mood is what bolsters the film fully. The sense of the peace having long been unravelled is found in the odd touches, like one of the few men on the island, alongside the weird one in a beach cabin, being a blind painter who seemingly depicts the future in his craft. Details like this adds so much to the proceedings and really made this a compelling horror story in the best of ways, even if this would be the sole production by its director/co-writer, the only other being The Trinity of Darkness (2014), a compilation of three of his older short films. This is a shame, and with what Dark Waters manages to accomplish by its final images, we could have had many potent horror films if Mariano Baino had been allowed/or wished to continue in theatrical film productions.

  

The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe (1974)

 

Director: José Mojica Marins

Screenplay: José Mojica Marins, Adriano Stuart and Rubens Francisco Luchetti

Cast: José Mojica Marins as himself/Coffin Joe, Alcione Mazzeo as Luciana, Ariane Arantes as Wilma, Geórgia Gomide as Lúcia, Joffre Soares as Júlio, Marcelo Picchi as Carlos, Marisol Marins as Betinha, Walter Stuart as Álvaro, Wanda Kosmo as Malvina

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

José Mojica Marins and his creation Coffin Joe, who came to be in cinema with At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1964), has been appreciated and preserved, both when Marins was still with us and after his 2020 passing. We are still missing one or two films however in his filmography, and one of the most prominent absentees is The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe, which you would naturally presume would be a part of the Coffin Joe catalogue with all the others as, even if appearing in the end only, that character is central to its biggest selling point. If you are a fan of this character, then the set up for this is a tantalising one of Marins and Coffin Joe crossing paths. Marins as himself is first shown directing on a film set a home invasion going amiss for the robbers when they did not expect the young couple their targeted to become elderly ghouls, and calmly taking an interview in a nice green jumper and with even his trademark long fingers nails on display. This is his other film metatextuality poking at his legendary creation, if a pulpier crossover between creator and creation, less dealing with the character in the real world but imagining himself being terrorised by his own creation.

The first film which tackled this, Awakening of the Beast (1970), was a really metatextual production because Marins was tackling the growing notoriety around the Coffin Joe character in terms of backlash. That film is arguably more difficult to appreciate if you have not seen another film of his, as it is a commentary on the controversy over his morbid character and the success he was having in popular culture in Brazil. However, especially when it turns into a full colour wig-out with buttock faced creatures in Hell, it became more readily available outside his homeland and paradoxically a more sellable film for how bizarre it is even with context. Bloody Exorcism does get to the risqué content by the time of the Satanist cult torturing people in Hell in the final act, but this is a straightforward genre film. A lashing of haunted house/witch's curse premise is fleshed into this, all in setting up the meeting between Marins as himself and Coffin Joe as the ultimate antagonist against his own creation. There is moments where he gets to portray himself as a very intelligent man, who gets to comment with other characters about his beliefs on how horror works and is liked as it is, but he himself is not going to dissect his evil creation as a construction as Awakening of the Beast did, but have Coffin Joe scaring him instead.

José Mojica Marins is the director-creator going to an island where a friend lives with his family, all with the intention to plan his next script only to become embroiled with an evil aura terrorising the family. To his credit, the opening has an appropriately sombre opening of him travelling to the location by boat, set to haunting chanting in the score. This is also set at Christmas, with adds an amusing touch as things will start to turn amiss as soon as he gets there. First it seems merely mischievous, like a chair moving by its own will, then starts to become more an issue when the grandfather becomes the first person to get possessed, and it is established everything is (literally) going to Hell. It is cool to see Marins, whose films have been as much sold for their transgressive and blasphemous content over the years play with more traditional horror tropes. As much of the reason that he became as controversial as he was as a horror creator was that Coffin Joe the character is an atheist who thumbed his nose at religion and morality, and believed in finding the perfect women to breed the perfect offspring by any means necessary, even murder. This has Coffin Joe as a literal evil near the end that our protagonist, and has the director/co-writer take a shot for the first half of Bloody Exorcism at the classic horror tropes of haunted houses and curses, where even a toy piano being played by itself is ominous as is Marins himself being assaulted by flying books. Not even the Christmas tree is safe from snakes briefly materialising from it.

Though that side will appear later on, it may disappoint some expecting him to have the extremes that made him a controversial figure at this time do not really appear as prominently here, where there is the cute moppet daughter and Marins' film is entirely on the side on the good nuclear family, but it is interesting to see him go through this plot thread. Connected to an angry witch terrorising the family who he has wandered into the drama of, all because the wife requested her help to be able to conceive a daughter on condition the witch choose who she would marry as an adult, each member of the family becomes possessed, and sadly even the family dog is not safe, all whilst Jose is trying to rationalise the scenario. I wonder if The Exorcist (1973) came to influence this or not, or even got to Brazil at that specific time to even be able to do so, its slower pace and gleefully eerie tone suggesting this as initially a "safer" if still fun Marins film. The score certainly helps, and eventually the tone shifts into more extreme content.

By that point, there is nude possession with inappropriate self use of a poker and Marins in a lovely pink suit being a bystander to the horrors he the director would shot throughout his career. As he finds himself in Hell with demonic worships and Coffin Joe leading them, it leads to his trope as a filmmaker of hiring extras of both genders, in general state of undress, with ghoulish carnival haunted house gore effects like a man having his tongue cut out taking place. In what could be best described as theatrical performance hellscape scenes, if you have seen other films of his, like Awakening of the Beast, and how he let these moments stretch out for their ghoulishness for minutes, this is the same thing here to escalate the film closer to his other work from the time. The crossover between character and creators is not as complex as Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), where Wes Craven revisited Freddy Krueger as an entity terrorising the people who made his films, but here you at least have Marins forced to confront his creation. Bemused as a terrified bystander who only intervenes when a child is threatened, this is an example a good few decades earlier, involves the creator in actual debate with the figure he said he created directly. It also emphasises the idiosyncratic, even schism-like, knife-edge too in his work, between revealing in the anti-religious horror but also making sure it always win, which is prevalent even in mind to a politically tumultuous time in Brazil when these films were being made. Like Jose's friend being a Catholic who yet is studying parapsychology without any more issues, his cinema is curious in terms of faith and anti-faith, where he can make Coffin Joe almost a true anti-hero, even if he had to always lose, but also made a film like The End of Man (1970), a film which has Joe's total opposite, a virtuous man of miraculous gifts, even if with satirical edges mocking the world socially and politically around this character. José Mojica Marins certainly hated organised complacency in general, and if there is a sense this films seems a more safer film, it is and is probably one of the reasons it could be seen as a weaker film from the director, as it feels like a pure horror story without an edge to it even with the nastier content coming into it by the end.  He can prod at organised religion in the earlier films, and be more gruesome in Embodiment of Evil (2008) when he would be allowed to get away with it, but still create the kind of film here which have a happy ending to keep the audience happy or a twisted morality play for others, censorship or not. Certainly, as this review started with, it is strange this film is seemingly lost among those available beyond his homeland, especially as it is still a fun production among them.