Halloween 31 For 31: Inferno (1980)

From http://www.qwipster.net/inferno.jpg

Director: Dario Argento

Screenplay: Dario Argento

Cast: Irene Miracle (as Rose Elliott); Leigh McCloskey (as Mark Elliott); Eleonora Giorgi (as Sara); Daria Nicolodi (as Elise Stallone Van Adler); Sacha Pitoëff (as Kazanian)

Synopsis: Continuing on from Suspiria (1977), Inferno builds up the mythology of the Three Mothers, three powerful witches who control the world. Mater Lachrymarum (The Lady of Tears), Mater Suspiriorum (The Lady of Sighs) and Mater Tenebrarum (The Lady of Darkness). Mater Suspiriorum, who occupied Germany, was central to Suspiria, whilst Mater Lachrymarum, who appears briefly in this film, occupies Rome and is central to the 2007 Argento film Mother of Tears. Mater Tenebrarum, who rules New York, is central to Inferno, as the information of the Three Mothers is being suppressed violently through bloody murders. Music student Mark Elliot (McCloskey) travels to the USA after learning of the distress of his sister Rose Elliot (Miracle) upon discovering the knowledge of the Three Mothers herself, and finds himself on route to meeting Mater Tenebrarum himself.

From https://myownpersonalhellblog.files.wordpress.com/
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Inferno overcomes probably one of the biggest issues with a genre film in structure. A narratively driven film can fall foul of being merely dragged along by the plot exposition and having to cover the narrative beats far too much. They desire to explain everything rather than let you drift through the film by your own intuition. Inferno's solution could be bluntly described as dream logic, but it's different from this. A very simple, concise plot unfolds but both enough is explained to the viewer whilst plenty isn't, leaving one to travel through the events with enough knowledge to grasp it but a lot more being discovered alongside the characters. Splitting the film up into situations following different characters has a pronounced effect. Everything connects together but the segments unfold as their own narratives, usually leading to gruesome death. While Mark becomes the lynchpin to keep it all together, events can unfold without him as well, having a drastic effect on how the film is watched. Every character introduced not only stands out but many get central focus for many minutes. As a result you get plenty of incredibly memorable sequences but also an unpredictable tone.

From http://www.timeoutdubai.com/images/content
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There's plenty of moments in Inferno that stand out, all of which interconnect under this loose plot completely seamlessly. You being the film with a standout and elaborate underwater sequence in a submerged room and it gets better from there, beginning the movie with an appropriate sense of anything being possible. Since this is a Dario Argento film the murder sequences are extremely stylish and heightened, but since Suspiria was a supernatural horror film, its sequel follows in the unconventional and fantastical mixed with symbolism from his down-to-earth giallo thrillers. Not only do you have the grand guinol of the more conventional murder sequences, brutal and unsettling, but you have sequences like people being savaged by cats or eaten to death by rats, all of which manages to be both beautiful but utterly foul and horrific. Unlike other Italian genre films which come off as cheesy, Argento's from this era still sting when it comes to depicting the deaths and the morbid nature around his films in general has retained a potency from this.

From http://screenmusings.org/movie/blu-ray/Inferno/images/Inferno-163.jpg

With Inferno you have the same heightened tone that is shared with Suspiria, very artificial set around an elaborate apartment complex where the evil is centred yet fully immersive at the same time. Genre filmmaking should effortlessly flow. It should use it's narrative to lead the viewer through a journey, especially if the film is entertainment first, having the virtue of effecting a viewer's emotions directly if done well. One of the best virtues of the Italian genre films in their heyday was their dreamy tones which allowed one to accept the irrational, thus avoiding distractions of logic in semblance to the real world that break the visage. Cinema is inherently an unrealistic medium, and unless one attempts to be as realistic as possible, it should negate the stumbles and falters as much as possible that take place when exposition and plotting block the steady flow of time. Inferno doesn't attempt to fully explain what's going on but this is for the better, as a quick witted viewer can build up enough from what they see onscreen and instead worry about the labyrinth of turns and abrupt ends that takes place for the characters, as much a film about travelling through various layers as one finds out the apartment complex has secret pipes and entrances within itself. Various strands from petty greed to the Three Mothers mythos interlink tentatively, and as various memorable casting choices like Nicolodi and Alida Valli pass onscreen, the film is able to work as a tense, eerily aired horror movie whilst ditching anything that would drag the film down into a mere plod.

From http://i263.photobucket.com/albums
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Technical Detail:

Suspiria was an exceptional film just for how its use of colour and lighting took the viewer into a supernatural world, but Inferno's aesthetic manages to go even further in some ways by becoming even more coloured and bold in its look. This would one of the last things the great director Mario Bava worked on before his death, behind the optical and visual effects, and in many ways, as a tip of the hat from Argento to the innovator who helped build the Italian genre industry, this film reflects the bold colours of his work like Blood and Black Lace (1964) incredibly. Like Suspiria, terror is not just to be found in the darkness but in colour itself, at their brightest and lurid during the most unsettling incidents. With Argento's work during his golden period, the colour saturation (or lack of colour as in Tenebrae (1981) fully envelops and becomes one with the haunted moods of his films.

Instead of Goblin, the music changed for this film, with Keith Emerson from the prog band Emerson, Lake and Palmer as composer. That band's an acquired taste, but Emerson's film scoring career is a cult following still waiting to happen - alongside Inferno you have the notorious anime blockbuster Harmagedon (1983), Nighthawks (1981) with Sylvester Stallone and Rutger Hauer, and Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) amongst other films. While many of these films aren't available in the UK, it's not surprising that prog rock fans can buy a compilation of Emerson's scores, the one for Inferno a great addition to Argento's musical canon by itself. Far more hysterical and on the cusp of absurdity with its choral chanting than the Goblin score for Suspiria, it helps push the irrationality of the film further with its alarmed, drastic tone.

From https://www.acheronbooks.com/img/cms
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Abstract Spectrum: Fantastique/Psychotronic

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

Inferno is Argento's most unconventional film, more than even Suspiria, rejecting the plot heavy narratives that his giallos tend to have completely. It follows a logic of its own that drifts between various characters and never gives priority over any specific one, Mark Elliot merely a grounded figure for the events happening to circle around. It's a filmic world where one can go to a library in Rome and, going downstairs, find oneself in an alchemist's laboratory. It's a film where events such as a total eclipse suddenly happens only to disappear; I don't complain about this sudden inclusion and abrupt end to such sights because the canvas of the film allows the moment to soak in regardless. So much more terrifying in films for me, like in Suspiria, is irrationality, that deaths can happen abruptly or events happen without being signposted, and as this desired template stands, Inferno is one of the strongest examples.

From http://photos.bravenet.com/272/478/925/3/E829847AD5.jpg

Personal Opinion:

Finishing off the Halloween 31 For 31 here with this the 31st entry, it's been a lot of written blog pages but aside from the fun of it, is there anything worth mentioning about it as a whole? Like the years before, once this is over some films I even praised highly will disappear from memory, not because they'll suddenly become bad but because my tastes are very selective. Some will grow in memory with the possibility of ones I gave less than stellar reviews of growing in stature. Others were too fun to even care about this. But there's a certain type of cinema that appeals to me, something that can sometimes be directly linked to a dream logic, which are very loose with structure plotting allowing the viewer to fill in the space, or merely have a unique personality to them of their own.

Inferno is one of the my favourite films. I don't care if the plot's ridiculous, makes no sense rationally or that like Suspiria another building of evil gets set on fire because of an accident at the end, far and away more appealing for this reason than countless horror films that are so heavily plotted you're stuck sitting through exposition scenes. The mythos built here helps give the film a greater atmosphere, building up a background that fills in what is not dealt with; unfortunately it seems, yet to dare see it, that Mother of Tears ruined the trilogy, but what is created here is a lot better than other horror films. With this film I'm not thinking of its logic or letting the world it creates become ruined by over thinking about it, instead an experience where, unlike a rollercoaster, everything presented onscreen is felt. Every death is painful, every jolt is startling, but the moments of quietness are just as effective. When the power goes on and off in one scene, causing a classic piece of music on a record player to jump, it lifts the hairs on the back of my neck, and more absurd scenes like death by rats have a phantasmagoric ickiness to them that's still effecting. Rather than coming away from Inferno as another horror film padded out with attempts to rationalise everything, the completely lack of this adds to its mystique, leaving it at the end with the same level of intensity felt as with Suspiria. Together the duo are incredible examples of Italian horror cinema, but I confess I may love Inferno the most.

Halloween 31 For 31: The Witches (1966)

From https://thetelltalemind.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/the-witches1.jpg

Director: Cyril Frankel

Screenplay: Nigel Kneale

Cast: Joan Fontaine (as Gwen Mayfield); Kay Walsh (as Stephanie Bax); Alec McCowen (as Alan Bax); Ann Bell (as Sally Benson); Ingrid Boulting (as Linda Rigg)

Synopsis: After a traumatising end to her career in colonial Africa, Gwen Mayfield (Fontaine) moves to a small rural village to become the schoolmistress. It becomes obvious that a malignant power is within the community, practicing witchcraft and hexing anyone who goes against their wishes, and as Mayfield uncovers more, her own life and soul is under threat as much as anyone else's.

From http://img.rp.vhd.me/4777641_l1.jpg

With The Witches, I cannot help but find the reason finally why I've been left cold to some Hammer films. I enjoyed The Witches immensely but the problem is here. Many of them have a depiction of the British as the passionless and passive which I find disappointing. Even though conservative values exist in many other horror films, normalcy usually winning against the transgression against them, you can still find the untamed and the chaotic bubbling away under the surface in many of these films even if it's an unintentional subtext. A few of the Hammer films I've seen have suffered from the normalacy you're supposed to be on the side on being a stereotype with no depth, where the working class are two dimensional yokels and anyone a class higher is the kind of figure you have satirised in a sketch from Monty Python. Where the heroes especially the English ones dangerous edge towards the stereotypes of British culture, that for all their connoisseur knowledge of wines and the occult they're the middle class at their most blandest. I've found that other British horror films, The Wicker Man (1973) an obvious one but even films I've unfairly dismissed like Death Line (1972), have far more fascinating and rich depictions of the British when they're good or memorable, where even the grimy streets have a charm and vitality to them to match the character actors onscreen. If it wasn't for how dynamic and talented actors likes Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were, I can't even find pleasure in siding with the Satanists or evil force as they're as in danger of being reduced to the equivalent of a bland cheese and wine party as well, and its not a surprise some of the most rewarding Hammer films are either very different from the others or have Lee and/or Cushing in them.

From http://film.thedigitalfix.com/protectedimage.php
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This is a problem with that, when you're supposed to sympathise with those representing normalcy, you don't necessarily sympathise with the villains instead but feel it come off as a detraction. With The Witches thankfully this doesn't completely undermine the film but it does leave it with flaws. The beginning sequence, with Mayfield in African being terrified by an African witchdoctor, has a sweltering and panicked atmosphere already that makes it stand out, making the change to the village for the rest of the film jarring for many reasons. (It also includes a surprise cameo by a very young Rudolph Walker; I know of him as the far more older, world weary policeman working under an incompetent senior inspector played by Rowan Atkinson in The Thin Blue Line (1995-6)). When you get to the village, entrenched fully into it, the normalcy of the cherub faced school kids Mayfield teaches and the housewives gathering around the charity second hand stalls feel like a curse of lifelessness in itself. It's supposed to be the good thing against the evil witches, but as someone who's seen documentary footage from this era and earlier, there's so much absent in these humble, quaint depictions you find especially in the Hammer films that it becomes slightly detracting here. Were it not for the beautiful English countryside, it's not a surprise people got bored in this village and turned to witchcraft. There's the possibility that, considering  the secret behind the witchcraft coven, that this is on purpose as a social comment, but the kids are so angelically bland that it's probably not the case.

From http://i389.photobucket.com/albums/oo337/AndreiShareTheFiles/
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The Witches is still entertaining regardless of this, and when this problem is contradicted by the content of the film itself, things get remarkably more interesting. Returning back in the season, Nigel Kneale wrote the screenplay. You can detect the same mind behind the Quatermass television and film adaptations, here explaining the possibilities of witchcraft through a then-modern and intellectual mindset. If he had added a few more of the eccentricities and character fleshing out you find in his Quatermass work a large deal of my issues with The Witches would be gone immediately. There are pockets of tantalising things instead that are very watchable. A standout for this is Kay Walsh as Stephanie Bax, a writer and scholar who's an older, no-nonsense woman who dresses in suit clothes and explains the possibilities of witchcraft with the naturalness of a modern intellectual discussing a sociological issue. [SPOILER WARNING] When its revealed she's the main antagonist, the film manages to bring out a shining gem of an idea where it's the rational intellectual, a charismatic woman at that, who's using black magic. With the intention of using a fourteen year old girl she's feels is a worthless imbecile to become youthful again, Ingrid Boulting who's mix of childlike behaviour and physical appearance brings up a troubling sexual mutability to the character, Bax has no issue in claiming no difference between an ancient magical text and atomic energy, turning the idea of occultism on its head in the process in a fascinating way. It does lead to some silly events at a Satanic orgy, with worm eating and the least expected choreographed dance scene possible in context, but this blackly humorous idea does stand out as a shining moment.[SPOILER WARNING END]

From http://www.cineoutsider.com/reviews/pix/w/wi/witches4.jpg

The intrigue and suspense that takes place, including Mayfield finding herself disorientated and placed in a nursing home away from the village, is interesting especially for the central period where the plot does something different, having the protagonist lost of memory and having to pick up where she was from the beginning. Fontaine did grow on me, playing the at-first ineffectual schoolmistress that shows more and more nerve and courage hidden behind her bold hairstyle and clothes as the stakes around her become much more troubling. This was her last feature film and she's clearly involved with it with conviction, helping the film by making sure this protagonist isn't bland. How the film resolves itself is through a single, simple thing that should sound anticlimax on paper but comes off as another inspired moment from a Nigel Kneale script, where rather than the plain and average characters you usually get in films like this who stumble through a situation, an act of intelligence wins out done at the right moment.

Technical Detail:

One thing I can never find any criticisms of in Hammer films especially when they're in colour is their visual appearance. Low budget films, they yet can be eye-popping when everything clicks. It came as an advantage when they added blood to the horror stories, cementing their reputation, and in The Witches you have plenty of examples to choose from, the lush English countryside where even the sheep fields have a grit to them to the almost psychedelic colours of the Satanic orgy near the end.

Abstract Spectrum: None

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

Nothing to detail.

Personal Opinion:

Still showing the traits I'm not a fan of in Hammer, The Witches has grown on me as I've typed this review up. Not the best it could've been but still immensely entertaining. 

Halloween 31 For 31: Kakurenbo: Hide & Seek (2004)

From http://pics.filmaffinity.com
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Director: Shuhei Morita

Screenplay: Shiro Kuro

Cast (English/Japanese): Dan Green/Makoto Ueki (as Yaimao); Michael Sinterniklaas/Junko Takeuchi (as Hikora); Sean Schemmel/Rei Naitou (as Noshiga); Tom Wayland/Mika Ishibashi (as Tachiji); Veronica Taylor/Akiko Kobayashi (as Suku); Veronica Taylor/Masami Suzuki (as Sorincha)

Reaching the end of the season, this'll be the last of the 1000 Anime entries for the month. From November onwards however, I'll start to include links to the site through blog posts through this one, allowing a connective tissue to exist between them so 1000 Anime doesn't stay the isolated project it still is as its starting to get on its legs. The short being covered for this final anime review has sadly become very out-of-print in terms of the only English friendly version I know of, although of interest alongside titles as diverse of Belladonna of Sadness (1973) to Mind Games (2004), Germany has had quite a few of the more experimental and artier anime titles get released through the same distribution company, something which causes me to view any German anime fan as being incredibly lucky in comparison to their British cousins. Maybe with a group like Anime Limited, the Brits will have a better chance of getting such titles, but the more curious fans would bite their own arm off to get any of these titles if they didn't import it from the US or directly from Japan already. Because of Kakurenbo's twenty or so minute only length, it's going to be a problem attempting to ever re-release it in terms of cost and marketability, especially with the costs involved with anime, a shame as this experiment in telling a story with a still new animation technique has lead to its director starting to make a high profile of himself adaptation Tokyo Ghoul (2014), a new and popular series fittingly Halloween appropriate.

Abstract Spectrum: Weird

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

Nothing to report in this area.

Personal Opinion:

For the full review, click the following link [HERE].

From https://toutestinmag.files.wordpress.com/
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Halloween 31 For 31: Trapped Ashes (2006)

From http://www.creepercast.com/wp-content/
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Directors: Joe Dante, Ken Russell, Sean S. Cunningham, Monte Hellman, John Gaeta

Screenplay: Dennis Bartok

Cast: John Saxon (as Leo); Jayce Bartok (as Andy); Henry Gibson (as Tour Guide); Lara Harris (as Julia); Scott Lowell (as Henry); Michèle-Barbara Pelletier (as Natalie)

Another anthology but unlike The ABCs of Death (2012), there's only five segments including a wraparound tale to tie it all up. This is closer to the template of the anthology genre, closer to camp fire tales or a short story collection in paperback form where short films are connected together by the already mentioned wraparound, usually designed to both bookend the stories and have a plot within it that splits off into each one. The anthology, if multiple directors and/or writers are involved, can allow them to experiment or take a shot at a high profile piece. If its from one set of creators only, it can either be a way to use good ideas that may not necessarily work for a whole ninety minutes or as productions which can bring in a variety of actors and talents. You can go as far back to Waxworks (1924) for an early example, but the heyday for these films were the sixties and seventies, where there were even non-horror anthologies where directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini were hired to create a segment.

Trapped Ashes is an oddity though - shelved for a long time, it's a Japanese co-production I suspect was as much for a Japanese audience considering the amount of Japanese producers and technical crew on the project, including music from Kenji Kawai, most well known in the West for his acclaimed scores for anime like Ghost In The Shell (1995). Three of the directors are cult figures, Sean S. Cunningham a smaller cult figure with immense importance for what he produced as well as that he directed, and John Gaeta was known for the visual effects for films like The Matrix (1999), making his filmic debut here. The film was co-produced and had its stories written by Dennis Bartok, former Head of Programming for the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles

From http://www.deadchannels.com/images/Trapped-Ashes-Wraparound_-_.jpg

"Wraparound" (Dir. Joe Dante)

Trapped Ashes is set up by a group of visitors to a film studio being trapped in a haunted house stage set from an old horror movie. Their guide (Gibson) recommends they replicate the story of the film by recounting their real life horror stories to each other, each playing themselves or having a representative in the tales. Dante's segment in all its pieces is really just set up, which is disappointing considering his reputation. I've still not watched a lot of his work - though Gremlin 2: The New Batch (1990) is a magnificent thing to behold - so all I can say is that he was stuck with a perfunctory and practical aspect of the anthology only lifted up by the impressive set design and John Saxon being amongst the cast.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4G7XqtPa_QY/UuDmnYoEhmI
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The Girl With Golden Breasts (Dir. Ken Russell)

Actress (Rachel Veltri) recounts how, desiring more roles in films, she got breast implant surgery only to find that the innovative and natural implants she opted for had a vampiric tendency to them. Russell is an unsung gem in himself, his excesses as rewarding and at least as entertaining as his best work like The Devils (1971). That many of his films are mishandled still today or are unavailable makes my passion for his work more stronger. That said, I realise that after the late eighties is an unchartered territory I may be baffled by, reminded of my experience with The Fall of the Louse of Usher (2002), one of his last films, shot in his garage, which only the most hardcore Russell fans would like. I'll be honest in saying The Girl With Golden Breasts, one of Russell's last ever works, is cheesy and for the sake of tastelessness than anything substantial. Vampiric breasts, a plastic surgeon's building that's a shrine to the mammary gland, and photos of botched implants, all of which amongst the many things meant to be crass on purpose. That the short ends with Russell himself in a cameo wearing a wig and having a pair of falsies pretty much states what to expect. The short exposes a problem with the entirety of Trapped Ashes in that the cinematography is very bland, and while I hate blaming a single person, I cannot help but wonder what the decisions of cinematographer Zoran Popovic were as all the directors involved, including one making his debut, would have had very different styles. Because of this, the short suffers further in being merely an exceptionally silly story.

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic

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

From http://drunkenzombie.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/
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Jibaku (Dir. Sean S. Cunningham)

Cunningham, director of the first Friday the 13th (1980) and producer of Wes Craven's The Last House On The Left (1972), gets the segment in this Japanese backed anthology set in Japan itself. A married woman Julia (Harris) recounts a vacation to the country where a student monk hangs himself in a graveyard. He comes back from the bed, seducing her with the intention of dragging her into the Jibaku, Buddhist hell which for anyone who's seen Jigoku (1960) should evoke many gristly things. Sadly the flat visual look makes the segment feel like it's been filmed in the US instead with Japanese actors brought in, but this does try quite hard at something interesting in its story. It also manages to the most transgressive segment of them all; I did not expect to speak about necrophilia again in this season after Nekromatik (1987) but it gets depicted in Jibaku with suitably gristly eroticism. The short also uses animation, from a Japanese studio, to depict things that might've been too expensive to attempt and to add some additional luridness to the material. In fact, while no way near as explicit, this animation does evokes Urotsukidoji: The Legend of the Overfiend (1989) only with a gender swap.  Because of this sort of content, trying to stand out, this is one of the stronger shorts of the whole film.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque

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

From http://www.festival-cannes.fr/thumb.php?sourceDirectory=/assets/
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Stanley's Girlfriend (Dir. Monte Hellman)

Hellman has his own cult by himself, more known for other types of genre cinema, like Two Lane Blacktop (1971), westerns and the infamous Cockfighter (1974). Stanley's Girl itself, while again blighted by the flatness of its look at times, is the strongest segment and the least expected. Saxon's character Leo, a film director, recounts how his younger self (Tahmoh Penikett) had a friendship with a fellow filmmaker Stanley Kubrick (Tygh Runyan), Kubrick at this point has made films like Killer's Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956), and just before he would go into exile in England, he met and fell in love with a young woman (Amelia Cook) who may be more sinister that her confident, erotic personality may suggest. The idea of a character drama based upon a legendary film director is a bold one. There's a danger in films referencing films where it becomes trite and egotistical for me, as it feels like in other parts of Trapped Ashes, but Stanley's Girlfriend was a pleasant surprise, something very different to find within a horror anthology and rewarding for this reason.

Abstract Spectrum: None

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

From http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/18800000/
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My Twin, The Worm (Dir. John Gaeta)

The cocky, opinionated Natalie (Pelletier) tells of when she was conceived, a tapeworm growing in her mother's body at the same time of the pregnancy that couldn't be removed whilst the child was in the womb. As a result, Natalie grows up in her infancy and childhood thinking of the parasite as a twin sibling, desiring to call upon it when, after his father leaves her mother, she finds herself bullied by his new girlfriend. It's an interesting, dark fairy tale which with a few tweaks would've stood out further. It does suffer from lacksure CGI in depicting the daughter growing in the womb as well, and the flatness of the cinematography is a shame when, partially set in an American winery ran by French immigrants, this story could've done even on a low budget with a more evocative and idyllic sheen to it to mix with the grimness of its later content.

Abstract Spectrum: None

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

Personal Opinion:

The finale of the wraparound and the film itself turns into a twist from the page of a certain Amicus anthology movie I've seen, very reminiscent and sudden which changes all the stories. Trapped Ashes however in general, like this twist, is a little disappointing in how it suffers from a lot of unused potential. Hellman's segment is a fascinating curiosity, and the others have plenty of interest, but it does feel impoverished at points to a negative point. Ending on an unexpectedly evocative and great end credit music by Kawai, this track suggests this could've been even better rather than flawed ridden if entertaining feature it turned out to be.

Halloween 31 For 31: Corridors of Blood (1958)

From http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large
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Director: Robert Day

Screenplay: Jean Scott Rogers

Cast: Boris Karloff (as Dr. Thomas Bolton); Betta St. John (as Susan); Francis de Wolff (as Black Ben); Adrienne Corri (as Rachel); Christopher Lee (as Resurrection Joe)

Synopsis: In 1840s London, renowned surgeon Dr. Thomas Bolton (Karloff) experiments with the possibility of surgery without pain, attempting to develop an anaesthesia gas. When his first public demonstration fails, he becomes despondent and starts a new experiment with an opium based gas for a stronger effect. The gas slowly robs him of his free will, devoted to his experiments to an obsessive state but becoming an addict at the same time, slowly becoming less competent at his daily work as the narcotic effects his mind. It also leads to nightly stupors he cannot remember, leading him into the clutches of Black Ben (de Wolff), a malicious inn keeper who with Resurrection Joe (Lee) offer fresh corpses to the hospitals for dissection, Bolton perfect to falsify the documents for a natural death.

From https://goregirl.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/corridors-of-blood4.png

Corridors of Blood has title perfect for a drive-in b-movie. But it has a double meaning here - it's a literal metaphor for a period before anaesthesia was developed, where the corridors were literally soiled, sawdust on the surgery room floor to soak up the gore during the operations. As someone who spent one term of a university history course studying medical history in the British Isles, it was a pleasant surprise to find out this not the mad scientist film I expected, but one directly placed in a part of history where body snatchers and the rocky beginnings of medical advancement existed. Whether this film qualifies as an actual horror film or not is up to debate, as much an issue as with whether it's also a drama or not, entrenched both but not completely. It's too lurid to be fully viewed as a sensible, sombre minded drama, but the horror is more in the London depicted in its germ ridden, poverty filled state. This was a period where graveyards would become so crowded bodies piled in together in the same grave, even if it meant digging them back up, to save space. A time the Thames became so filled with faecal matter and waste the Houses of Parliament suffered from the smell projected off it during a hot early afternoon. The horror is in death as a matter-of-fact acceptance of life, especially in a time before pain relief in surgery when amputation was more common.

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In the central role of a doctor with good, potentially revolutionary intentions lost to failure and addiction, Karlof is perfect. This is him when he's much older, more of the kind grandfather figure with a great warmth and intelligence to him. You feel pity as his mind degrades into repeating continuing his experiments on instinct just for an opiate fix; the gravitas needed to make a character like this more than just the bland figure found in Karloff. In general the casting exceptionally well done. Even in the likes of Black Ben and his wife Rachel, the stereotypes of evil working class who feed off their own, having actors like de Wolff and Corri to give the roles more relish improves on the basic characterisations. Amongst the cast Christopher Lee has only a small role in contrast to the films he would be getting by this point in his career, the same period as his first Hammer Dracula film, but as Resurrection Joe he's allowed to try out something different. An unnerving thug dressed in stark black clothes and hat, Lee's visible height difference against other actors makes him tower over people like a ghoul. That the film never becomes an outright horror film, depicting these characters as opportunists who smother people in their drunken stupors and sell their freshly killed bodies, changes the type of fear they generate. It's nice to know that, rather than a heavy handed anti-drug message this side of Reefer Madness (1936), the concern with Bolton is in him losing his morals in his opium induced cloud by accident rather than becoming immoral immediately. In fact that the ending moves on briefly with historical progress comes off as a more thoughtful way to end the character's plotline. The only thing remotely like an anti-drug movie is the trippy effect used to depict Bolton's opium highs, using previously used footage and audio in repetitious layers until it piles on top of each other, which in itself is a nice thing in itself to have as said sequences do succeed into being very woozy in their effect.

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Technical Details:

The production design is a key factor for how the film works very well. Shot in rich monochrome, the replicated streets of 19th century London with all its back alleys and rundown streets adds a personality to the film. While the version depicted here is still sanitised - there are always cutaways just before a surgical procedure takes place, only the bloody tools depicted - it thankfully avoids becoming too cleaned and false.

Abstract Spectrum: None

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

Nothing of note with this film.

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Personal Opinion:

It was an immense surprise to see this. I've been a lot more picky when it comes to British genre films but this one appealed to me more for its historical setting and context for the plot. That it's got Karloff in such a sympathetic lead role adds to this, not another mad doctor figure but something, again, different from usual. Befittingly this was screening after midnight on BBC2, the closest thing I'd get to the old broadcasting schedules where this sort of film was shown more often, adding a greater worth to my delight in the film as the channel introduced me to a film I'd never heard of before.

Halloween 31 For 31: Possession (1981)

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Director: Andrzej Żuławski

Screenplay: Andrzej Żuławski and Frederic Tuten

Cast: Isabelle Adjani (as Anna/Helen); Sam Neill (as Mark); Margit Carstensen (as Margit Gluckmeister); Heinz Bennent (as Heinrich); Johanna Hofer (as Heinrich's mother)

Synopsis: Returning home from an espionage mission, Mark (Neill) discovers that his wife Anna (Adjani) has had an affair. Their marriage starts to break down immediately after, but rather than with her Zen-like, New Age lover Heinrich (Bennent), Anna is occupying an isolated room with an entity scrapped from the bowels of the subconscious. In a narrative that includes spies, body horror and internal turmoil set in the closed-in walls of West Germany, Żuławski's response to Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage (1973) is as overwhelming experience.

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From the first ten minutes onwards, this is proven as Possession in tone is drastically different from many a film. A heightened intensity is here that is far and away more pronounced that many other films I've covered on the blog. The acting is made to be at a vastly intense level than usually seen, as is common in other Żuławski films, not necessarily theatrical but feral, basic emotions taken to their fullest. A scream is prolonged and stretched longer, as is a state of shock made to look catatonic. Adjani's performance is legendary, spasming and wailing when she's not struggling to keep herself together, culminating in a freak-out in a subway corridor where she is almost possessed demonically, but Sam Neill is just as startling. A man more well known for films like Jurassic Park (1993), his character soon into the film, even before Adjani's Anna, is losing his sanity from the prospect of losing his wife to another person. The actual separation is equivalent to a drug withdrawal, twisting in the foetal position on a sweat drenched and bared bed, and how Neill used a rocking chair onscreen is as if he's able to defy gravity, rocking with the intensity in his eyes of someone lost in another reality. The performances in general from all the actors are just as intense, and the leads are exceptional, but this film does as well prove that any actor can give a truly full bodied performance, willing to go the extra distance for the sake of the intensity required. You see such a drastic difference in something like this in contrast to a lesser film like Neill's Sirens (1993) from what was required from him.

Experiencing Possession is an entirely different prospect than a lot of films. In the cusp of many genres and in an entirely new one of its own, many parts of the film tip over into the ludicrous when it's not being intentionally humorous in a blackened way, but there's always something to crawl under your skin to counteract this. Written during a severe breakup with his first wife, Żuławski's film feels too focused, too real at points for it to trivialise its marital breakup narrative when Anna's lover turns out to be a humanoid squid monster designed by Carlo Rambaldi. The film is too dynamic, too rich in details for that sentence to reveal too much, the pain depicted too real and said monstrosity taking the form of a repressed emotion in all its slimy, visceral birthing.

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Technical Details:

Adding to all of this is a prowling, continually moving camera that will yet stay still and focus on an important emotional moment long enough for it to be fully felt. Cinematographer Bruno Nuytten should be as praised for what he does in his role, bringing this elastic camera work that follows the performers onscreen with the same level of intensity as they are depict in front of it. The music by Andrzej Korzyński is just as evocative, providing a similar intensity with each electric wash of the synthesizer heard, never overbearing or drowning out the actors' performances but adding to them.

From https://doctorinsermini.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/possession04.jpg

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Mindbender/Psychotronic

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

Żuławski's directorial style is a unique one. You can distinctly tell when you're watching a Żuławski film. The few that I have seen can be counted on a full, single hand with one additional finger - in order of preference On The Silver Globe (1988), this, The Third Party of the Night (1971), Diabel (1972) and Szamanka (1996) - and all of them are a perpetual machine of heightened energy that can exhaust a viewer unprepared for them. It's not all shrieking or extremity, as Possession is built as much from moments of calm or immense sadness - Mark coming out of a three week binge of separation anxiety only to realise their son Bob's been left all alone in the family home - the moments of trauma with an electric carving knife or the parents hitting each other of set by tragedy of a relationship breaking to pieces as painfully as possible. The dialogue is poetic, at times difficult to catch from how fast its spoken or how the cracking voices distort it, the unnatural body horror an extension of these emotions. As in David Cronenberg's The Brood (1979), it literalises the ideal of horror cinema being a projection of human anxieties and emotions.

The stranger parts of the film, as in other Żuławski films, add to the maddened tone, at times as if the film is continually hurtling alone to the point it'll collapse like Mark on a motorbike at one point. But somehow it manages to sustain itself at full speed to the end credits. Men in shocking pink socks vie with an unexpected car crash, and there's of course Bennent's performance as Heinrich which is strange in itself, a cat suit wearing Zen lover still living with his mother, in the pains of delirium at points with as much intensity as Mark and Anna, even more so at points until he goes blind in one moment. Trying to locate his soul later on is far from a pointless tangent into the spiritual but becomes real possibility, about to wander in on Mark considering the tone of the film as it stands.

The film already leaps into the metaphysical beyond the tentacled possession with Anna's double, a nursery school teacher Helen also played by Adjani. She is meant to be the saint to Anna's whore, white dress with pigtails and a concern for Bob, but on this viewing there's something far too deep and pulsating in the green contact lenses Adjani has to wear, something too white about the dress and her flirtations with Mark are far more obvious the more you watch the film, a greater depth and mudding of that stereotype. That doesn't even add what the squid entity turns out to be, complicating things further, and when the film ends on an apocalyptic note, the world effected by this relationship, it's the only appropriate ending for a work like it.

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Personal Opinion:

Possession's a lot to take, still too much for me to fully digest. So much is utterly absurd, some of it even silly, but most of it is still startling to watch. The performances linger in my mind and the tone is so delirious that to use the word "delirious" seems mistaken, instead as if the emotions depicted have been allowed to be felt through every pore of the actors' bodies. Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage, which I've seen the theatrical cut of only, is an intense film and there's actually little difference between the two films despite Żuławski responding with what he felt was a more accurate depiction of the subject matter. The acting in Bergman's film is just as unrelenting but its depicted entirely from a realism. Żulawksi's film includes the unreal and the subconscious, allowing it to walk out into reality. Hence not only the body horror but also the almost hypnotised acting styles from the cast. Experiencing Possession feels like being hypnotised yourself, thrown through one emotional current another without respite. Why would anyone want to watch this reading that sentence? When for someone, cinema is never just a comfort food. It prickles emotions barely touched. The inappropriately silly moments, the disturbing moments, the genre blurring and the unpredictability, all of it's a standard bearer for a cinema of the abstract if there was any.

Halloween 31 For 31: The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

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Directors: James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber

Cast: Herbert Stern (as Roderick Usher); Hildegarde Watson (as Madeline Usher); Melville Webber (as a Traveller)

Synopsis: An avant-garde adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's story in which brother and sister Usher (Stern and Watson) are cursed by a malady that will lead to their doom in their ancestral home.

The Fall of the House of Usher has been adapted a few times. The same year as this one in 1928 Jean Epstein adapted the story for a feature length version that was as unconventional in presentation and style. Roger Corman started his series of Poe adaptations (barring one adapting H.P. Lovecraft) with the House of Usher story. Ken Russell somewhat based a film around the story, if anything of it does exist in said film alongside the other Poe references, and shot said story in his garage. This version is one of only three films made between James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, the others including the equally well regarded Lost In Sodom (1932), and a personal favourite Tomatoes Another Day (1930), shot by Watson only, a parody of bad cinema that predates the use of "bad" filmmaking but uses them, rather than for irony, for turning the scenario it depicts into a hilarious and absurd reality where being shot dead doesn't mean you're staying on the ground a second later. While this does retain the basic outline of the Poe story, the directors only went from memory of what took place in the narrative, allowing the result to drift off into something different entirely. Having e.e. cummings write the shooting script - a poet known for fragmented poetry which played with how their stanzas are structured and how a reader even intonates the sounds reading the words - was as well an encouragement to fragment the tale down to its primal form.

A film of the silent era, it clearly absorbed countless influences from films before it but it itself now exists outside of time, new and alien to current cinema regardless of its age. Set in an environment fully indebted to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) populated by giant, geometrical shapes, the film is entirely a mood piece, whittling the original story down to basic images, the most important of placing someone alive in a locked coffin and the madness that bubbles up to the surface. There was no sound, and barring inspired use of letters marking out sound effects at one point, objects alongside everything else onscreen, there's no intertitles either. Everything is depicted through in-camera effects or artificial locations, the three actors within the film as much puppets or automatons who gesticulate and change their bodies at will for the shot being taken.

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Technical Details:

Entirely shot in black and white, it's entirely opposite to Corman's lush colour adaptation but the result is an alternative form of atmosphere, an all-engulfing mass where even if you see a great deal in a shot its melded to the shadows. The film becomes expressionist not just from its look by how the in-camera effects are used, from reverse photography to superimposition, all of which are intentionally unrealistic, the plasticity of the cinematic form effecting the nightmare being depicted too, the later made sculptable by these effects. It's not Vincent Price in states of shock using his acting here but the camera tilting at one stage with the environment following it in its slant, looking like both will fall off the edge. The environment, the walls themselves, can be ripped open by an ordinary people and the film, without needing to follow Poe's tale strictly, can add its own character in how each imposition of images over others have their own character and effect the tone.

Abstract Spectrum: Experimental/Expressionist/Weird

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

When set to the right music, this perfectly conveys the emotions from the original short story, the few hand built sets used appropriately claustrophobic and everything reduced to the most pronounced, bold shapes and symbols. What's actually depicted in the film is very minimalist at times, merely a wall of the set behind a distorting camera effect, but from the multiplication of one of the actors' faces to a silhouette on the wall, everything is evocative and once you learn to appreciate the film in how it communicates this with the visuals only, it becomes a lot more bolder as a result.

Personal Opinion:

Avant-garde shorts are a particular favourite of mine. For the many that are difficult at first to understand, and for the few that are just technical experiments in form and light rather than emotionally relatable, at their best they push what you can do with cinematic form. Neither on an intellectual level alone either, as they can effects you with a gut impact like The Fall of the House of Usher does. They subject you to something that strays away from what you expect a film to usually look and act like. Poe's stories are as much about what is not conveyed directly in the lines, even if he's very explicit in his descriptions and ideas, something which links hand-in-hand with an experimental short like this whose main good is to convey emotions like fear through less conventional images that are yet more real and impactful. 

Halloween 31 For 31: Theatre of Blood (1973)

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Director: Douglas Hickox

Screenplay: Anthony Greville-Bell

Cast: Vincent Price (as Edward Kendal Sheridan Lionheart); Diana Rigg (as Edwina Lionheart); Ian Hendry (as Peregrine Devlin); Harry Andrews (as Trevor Dickman); Coral Browne (as Miss Chloe Moon)

Synopsis: A circle of theatre critics led by Peregrine Devlin (Hendry) is being picked off one-by-one through a series of bizarre murders. Fears rests upon the idea that actor Edward Lionheart (Price), presumed to be dead, is the culprit getting revenge on the critics who trashed his performances of William Shakespeare and deprived him of a critics' award years earlier. Will Devlin be on the list of deaths inspired by the Bard's plays?

Vincent Price is as much a pop culture figure separated from his filmography as much as he was a popular actor. I'd have first encountered him as a young child through his narration in Michael Jackson's Thriller, both menacing yet having too much fun describing ghoulish horrors for the words to get too serious. His figure in horror films like House on Haunted Hill (1959) suggests someone who presided over high camp and relishes his evil villainy while about to twirl his slickly combed moustache. But watching even a small sample of his films paints additional layers onto him as an actor. The heavy in a film like Otto Preminger's Laura (1944), the seriousness of Witchfinder General (1968), or the lurid yet baroque Poe films by Roger Corman. With Theatre of Blood you see the mix of the absurd in Price's acting style with moments of elegance and seriousness, the high and low brow melding together. A strange double bill, strange because they were so close together, appeared in Price's career in the early seventies with The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) and Theatre of Blood, all about people being picked off by his character in bizarre ways. The film being covered today had the inspiration, truly mixing the high and low brow, of taking Shakespeare as its central text.

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Here, this rather brilliant idea of using the deaths from Shakespeare's plays in a black comedy horror film works out for multiple reasons. First it enforces that, as much as his work was great poetry and life enhancing, William Shakespeare was doing so in populist plays which could be violent and bawdy. Titus Andronicus alone has plenty of gristly events that are still shocking centuries later, and it's not surprising the most infamous part of that play is the most memorable scene here in its reinterpretation, with Price hamming it up as a French chef as the moment plays out. But in having this premise as well, Price was allow while still in the type of film he was typecast through to play something different, able to show a dynamic range through being allowed to monologue actual Shakespearian soliloquies and dialogue between the ridiculous plot twists. He's exceptionally good at all of them, Theatre of Blood itself an incredibly silly genre film which realises this and has Price balance between playing a theatrical ham and also perform these extracts with full sincerity. It's rare for an actor to be able to do this in the same film where he has to play, in one of Lionheart's various disguises, a camp hairdresser with a giant, white guy afro but Theatre of Blood completes the cinematic bucket list for that sort of cinematic image.

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A  huge part of the film's appeal is that, even in small roles, there're actors here I'm becoming more and more knowable of from British cinema - Michael Hordern, Dennis Price and Diana Dors amongst others - their various and diverse catalogues of roles adding to this film a web between the type of movies made in this era. This could be seen as indifferent to the best virtues of Theatre of Blood - that it's playful, funny, and never drags its feet in pointless plotting but gets to the gruel quickly - but at the same time the acting is a significant part to why the film actually works. Casting Diana Rigg as Lionheart's daughter is not a bad thing in itself at all, but also for the critics being picked off you need actors who stand out in their roles even playing stereotypes. My only disappointment in this area is that Arthur Lowe - most well know for Dad's Army but appearing in films like from Lindsay Anderson's to The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970) - only gets a short time onscreen, a shame because in the films I've seen he's managed to steal scenes for titans like Peter Cook and Malcolm McDowell effortlessly despite looking like a middle age banker. The actors' various roles in other films - the most surprising for me that Dennis Price went from Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) to Jesus Franco's Vampyros Lesbos (1971) - adds to this.

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The other factor is that, while no way near as violent as modern films or even the horror films being made in the early seventies and earlier around it, Theatre of Blood is still incredibly sadistic and more so because it's played for laughs. As you forget how barbarous Shakespeare could be, you forget how vicious British cinema could be in the humour or the murders that take place in our movies. An American like Price fits the grand eloquence and cheekiness of this film with ease, but even at its most high minded, this is still a film where he gloats as a man is drowned in a giant barrel of wine and he suits that perfectly as well. Even if it seems like part of the older horror films from before - the seventies when companies like Hammer or Amicus were going to go from their glory days to dying legs by the end of the decade - it matches the grim tone of the era even if its laughing at the same time.

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Technical Detail:

One thing I've had to adapt to with my country's cinema is that, while there're plenty of auteurs, the backbone especially of sixties and seventies cinema in the country was made of working directors, incredibly talented and experienced but who didn't put personal trademarks into the films, instead filming them as faithfully to their material as possible. I've grown to love these films, after originally dismissing the genre films especially, and if anything now the really fascinating aspects of these sorts of films is the period detail. All shot in London, you have both elaborate, deserted theatres in their aged beauty and the grimy realism of an urban street; as much a history lesson of what life was like before I was born, accepting the grubbiness of the locations means there's as much fun soaking in said aesthetic too.

From http://cdn-static.denofgeek.com/sites/denofgeek/files/s
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Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque

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

Not abstract all but I have to step back and think how odd some of the content actually is. A fully realised theatrical stage, with multiple levels, with Price in full costume and makeup for The Merchant of Venice...all in favour for only killing one person and populated with homeless meth drinkers who had their own choreographer for the film. Price as the aforementioned camp hairdresser flirting with a policeman, even if it might be un-PC today, a fencing battle were the fighters partially brawl doing flips on separate trampolines, and Devlin decrying Lionheart rewriting the Bard are all strange and utterly entertaining things even if they don't make the film abstract. Compared to genre films made in Britain now, few have anything like in this one.

Personal Opinion:

A film that's just entertaining, and that's more than enough to say.