Snake Girl and the Silver Haired Witch (1968)

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Director: Noriaki Yuasa

Screenplay: Kimiyuki Hasegawa

Cast: Yuko Hamada (as Yuko Nanjo); Sachiko Meguro (as Shige Kito); Yachie Matsui (as Sayuri Nanjo); Mayumi Takahashi (as Tamami Nanjo); Sei Hiraizumi (as Tatsuya Hayashi); Yoshirô Kitahara (as Goro Nanjo)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #22

With this film I get to enter the world of Kazuo Umezu for this blog. Unfortunately he's not as easily accessible as Junji Ito is in terms of his manga being available in English, much of it only published in the USA and now out of print, but he's a very important name in horror manga. As memorable for being Where's Wally's (Waldo's) cousin, obsessed with the colours of barber shop red and white stripes, as he is for his work Umezu has been penning ghoulish horror stories since the fifties. This isn't the first time I've personally seen an adaptation of his work - having to thank obsessive Western anime fans for making a VHS rip available on the net for The Curse of Kazuo Umezu (1990), a straight-to-video anime of sixty minutes based on two of his stories, with English subtitles - but this is the first one which has the added delight of being a live action Japanese genre film during the golden era of the sixties. From the multi colour nightmares of Jigoku (1960) to Nikkatsu's gangster films, the sixties were an exceptionally strong decade for Japanese cinema both for art and entertainment, the strangest of films having as high a technical quality as the artistic minded dramas.

With this in mind, appeal also found in the high aesthetic quality being also met with films with logic defying plots, Snake Girl and the Silver Haired Woman is a strange, frankly convoluted piece of delirium, combining two of Umezu's stories into an adolescent horror film with an edge. It feels like the kind of film targeted to a young female audience with its fairytale qualities - it follows a protagonist that's a sweet and likable young girl called Sayuri Nanjo (Matsui), adopted back to her real family but finding herself, when the father has to go on a business trip to Africa, with an older sister Tamimi (Takahashi), that's kept a secret from him. Things become more macabre when there's a possibility that she's a literal snake girl, already jealous of her presence but possibly with intentions of also eating Sayuri when she has the chance. The film is surprisingly gristly, a woman killed in the first few minutes from pure fear when a snake is thrown at her, and from there there's a peculiar blend of a murder mystery drama with horror tropes, enough snakes terrorising Sayuri in her sleep if it isn't spiders swarming on her bed to give a viewer the jitters, and enough sinister atmosphere to match it as the housemaid doesn't believe anything she says and Tamimi acts more and more hostile to her. Then there are details such as introducing disfigurement, a mother with severe amnesia, an acid bath with intentions for Sayuri to be dunked into it, and convoluted plot twists to make the film intoxicating over only eight minutes. That's not even explain when the silver haired witch comes into the plot to also terrorise Sayuri, suddenly appear and causing the film to get even more stranger.

The plot does get confusing but it's able to get away with this because a great deal of the film plays off as a psychodrama. A lot of its tension actually taps into a real human emotion that would appeal to a lot of viewers, how the older sister who is kept secret and locked away hates Sayuri's prescience, treating her with contempt and only wanting their mother's love for herself. Even if there wasn't the threat of her being part snake, her contempt including encouraging Sayuri to sleep in the attic is effecting by itself. The film's also extremely beautiful to look at, the monochrome adding a grace to it. It has a dream-like tone that literally leads to dream sequences for Sayuri, none of them explained in why she has such nightmarish images in her sleep,  adding to their weirdness.

Filmed in a distorted reality, the first immediately raises the bar when the doll Sayuri is given, comes to life by way of an actress superimposed to be tiny next to a prone girl. Even when the effects are incredibly dated by today's standards - a snake girl stand-in that comes from the same school as  the hag in William Castle's House on Haunted Hill (1959) - they add to the weird effect of the dream sequences by them being dreams and the incredible style of the whole film in general in spite of said effects. The quality of Snake Girl and Snake Haired Witch is why it was so watchable, a gleefully odd horror movie which yet has a wonderful sense of aesthetic sadly missing in a lot of modern horror cinema. As someone who still desperately wants to read Kazuo Umezu's original manga, something like this nonetheless feels like a successful adaptation, even if it may have taken extreme liberties, because of its macabre tone and how it encourages me to want to read those original stories it took inspiration from.

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Dead of Night (1972)

From http://shop.bfi.org.uk/media/catalog/
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Directors: Don Taylor (The Exorcism); Rodney Bennett (Return Flight); Paul Ciappessoni (The Woman Sobbing)

Screenplay: Don Taylor (The Exorcism); Robert Holmes (Return Flight); John Bowen (The Woman Sobbing)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) #1

[Note: Following on from writing mini-reviews of horror films that don't fit the abstract categories of the site, it felt like sacrilege to ignore horror television. With this in mind it was worth devoting a spin-off just for horror television; it'll be more sporadic in quantity, especially from how long television can be, but it'll offer a special one-off once in a while.]

Not to be confused with the 1945 Ealing Studios anthology horror film of the same name - which is for another day's blog post - Dead of Night is a BBC horror anthology series that barely survived into the current day. The less than inspiring take on archiving televised productions that was sadly common at one point with British television has led to potentially important archival materials being lost, from early episodes of Dr. Who to most of Dead of Night, only three of this series' episodes said to still exist out of seven. We can all be grateful for having the surviving episodes because by themselves they are exceptional creepy chillers.

Out of the trio The Exorcism, heavily advertised on the British Film Institute DVD cover and rescreened on television, is the high point of the three stories. Set at Christmas, a couple Rachel (Anna Cropper) and Edmund (Edward Petherbridge) invite another, Dan (Clive Swift) and Margaret (Sylvia Kay), over for dinner at their new country home only for a building series of eerie and disturbing events to take place. I have a tendency to slag off British horror cinema from this period for being overrated and low quality, but British horror television is growing into a great capsule of creativity for myself which puts the theatrical releases mostly to shame. Even though I have a preference for visually distinct works, the stage set production here is helped by the quality of the acting and how strong the script is (and how strong they are for all three episodes). Particularly with viewing these three episodes I've pinpointed a major problem with certain horror films, including the British ones I've hated, in how one of the best virtues of The Exorcism like the rest of Dead of Night is how it's more of a character drama that has supernatural content directly connecting to it, emphasising the pre-existing drama alongside the chills in the mixture.

The Exorcism is actually a politically minded short work, based on the director-writer's own political leanings, an incredibly socialist viewpoint which takes a dark view of how people distance themselves from others' poverty especially on festive holidays, its placement at Christmas having a macabre and brutal critique at its century where the truth of the haunting taking place involves the  old effect of a person being mistreated and downtrodden as others spent time in lavish celebration. Alongside an incredibly sinister nature of the haunting, where the two couples become trapped in the house in its own dimension, the tone also is a fitting part of British horror which would lead to the hauntology moment, how the reverberations of the past still haunt the living and can be tapped into if a certain thing is triggered. Fitting The Stone Tape (1972), a great work penned by Nigel Kneale that encapsulates this idea further, was meant to be an episode of Dead of Night before it was spun-off as a feature length TV film by itself.

In comparison to the impact The Exorcism will have on viewers especially by its bleak ending, Return Flight is mellower and the weakest of the trio.  It's still a strong episode in its own right however. About an older passenger jet pilot Captain Rolph (Peter Barkworth) who wonders whether he may have encountered a ghostly pilot of a World War II Lancaster bomber during a flight, the most interesting and rewarding aspect of the episode in the modern day is how it tackles the effect of WWII on people the age of the protagonist and Britain in general at that time. Dealing with the two World Wars in popular culture is far more pertinent when the creators grew up in the aftermath of it, for example Pink Floyd's The Wall (both the album and the film) from the perspective of Roger Waters as a child born in 1943, and it's clear with its tale of a man old enough to have served in the war but unable to, living in the shadows of others who died during the Battle of Britain period of the war, that the drama in Return Flight has greater bite as older male characters reflect on their lives with a real sense that the emotions of the war are being shown by the writer. That the character drama in this episode hinges on far more ambivalence than the other two, blurring whether it's actually supernatural events taking place or stress confusing the protagonist's reality, really helps Return Flight stand out even if sandwiched between two gems.

Out of the three, A Woman Sobbing manages to be the bleakest of the trio, and even if television now is more explicit in sexual content and tackling adult issues like failing marriages, this episode is still sobering in how much it tackles for an early seventies television programme, actually more adult and willing to take on taboos than a lot of the Hammer horror films at the time could ever dare to.About a wife Jane (Anna Massey) slowly disintegrating from the stress of midlife crisis, a loveless marriage with her husband, and hauntings in their new home including a woman crying at night that only she can hear, the show is very surprising in how blunt it is in its themes of illness, adultery and sexuality. The wife openly admits to hating her children at one point and the discussions on sex are on the nose, particularly going as far as have two dream sequences, one of the wife fantasising about a crude speaking plumber that briefly appears, the other for the husband involving actual nudity with a naked Dutch au-pair straight out of a British sexploitation film of that time. Because a lot of this television at this point had a stripped down, economic cinematography and style, the scripts and acting had to take centre stage, the quality of it here particularly distinct with Massey in the lead, her character a woman sympathetic in her plight but becoming more and more broken down close to insanity by its ending. None of the three episodes take easy ways out with their finales but A Woman Sobbing does have an ending that is just piped as the best by The Exorcist out of the trio.

Altogether the three episodes are rediscovered treasures that were thankfully rediscovered. The obvious tragedy is that the other five episodes have been lost (as of current knowledge) permanently. There's a sense from the strength of this trio to suggest that this series had a few gems amongst its seven episodes that will sadly never be seen again, leaving mere speculation of what the others were like, alongside archival materials the anecdotes of the series' creators and the opinions of people who hopefully first saw this series when it was first screened left to learn about the show from. The three here certainly emphasise that, even if I commit blasphemies by claiming the British horror cinema disappointed in this era in terms of quality, the television from that era however is becoming a tantalising era of material I'll gladly search more out of.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-h5ulAj5oiuI/VmgPdsrWoEI
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Baccano! (2007)

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Director: Takahiro Omori

Screenplay: Noboru Takagi

(Voice) Cast: Masaya Onosaka (as Isaac Dian); Sayaka Aoki (as Miria Harvent); Akemi Kanda (as Czeslaw Meyer); Atsushi Imaruoka as (Dallas Genoard); Chiwa Saito (as Carol); Daisuke Sakaguchi (as Jacuzzi Splot); Eri Yasui (as Lua Klein); Hiroyuki Yoshino (as Firo Prochainezo); Keiji Fujiwara (as Ladd Russo); Kinryuu Arimoto (as Szilard Quates); Marina Inoue (as Eve Genoard); Masakazu Morita (as Claire "Vino" Stanfield); Mitsuru Miyamoto (as Maiza Avaro); Ryou Hirohashi (as Chane Laforet); Sanae Kobayashi (as Ennis); Yu Kobayashi (as Nice Holystone)

Synopsis: Surrounding a select number of years in early thirties New York and the East Coast of the USA, Baccano! chronicles an incident involving a train from Chicago to New York called the Flying Pussyfoot where a massacre takes place, the gangsters, miscreants and terrorists on the train connecting to other events before and after in time. From the younger daughter of a wealthy family Eva Genoard searching for her older brother Dallas, a ruffian who has vanished, to an elixir of immortality which makes it incredibly difficult for someone to stay dead, everything connecting to the train incident as a group of journalists try to collect as much information on this as they can.

Baccano! - Italian for ruckus for anyone who was interested in knowing what the title means - is a prime example of how a television series can be inventive just in terms of its structure and how it tells its story. A Japanese animated series that pays tribute to American gangster films by way of its own fantastical spin, it throws the viewer into an off-beat world full of exceptionally colourful characters. Thieves Isaac Dian and Miria Harvent, who are so blissfully stupid that most people immediately love them on first meeting. Firo Prochainezo, a young man being introduced into the world of organised crime by way the older and wiser Maiza Avaro. Ennis, a mysterious suited woman Firo meets whose existence is conflicted and connected to the sinister Szilard Quates, an elderly man with malicious intents. Ladd Russo and his timid fiancée Lua Klein, a sociopath who loves to kill people and decided to take his men onto the Flying Pussyfoot in white suits to slay the passengers only to bump into a gang wearing black suits, terrorists who want to hijack the train to release from jail their leader,  whose mute daughter Chane Laforet is amongst their mission. Czeslaw Meyer, a young boy who is acts being innocent and naive. Jacuzzi Splot and Nice Holystone, romantically connected leaders of a pack of good anti-heroes attempting to steal cargo from the train, and countless other characters including the Rail Tracer, a legendary monster that haunts the rail lines that turns out to be real, only seen as a streak of red flash before picking off figures violently.

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The plot could easily become complicated but a huge advantage to Baccano! is how carefully structured it is. Instead of a chronicle structure, including Eva Genoard 's search for her brother and other time periods, including how characters got onto the train and how some can't even die, the show shuffles the situations out of order, the end of the train massacre shown in the first episode but the events within that situation amongst other time periods shown in more and more detail throughout the series. Based on a light novel series by Ryōgo Narita, the result is a puzzle box which expands incidents with greater amounts of information as the story is deepened. Baccano! is a series that was clearly planned from the beginning to its end; unfortunately anime series can be effected by not planning out the endings or issues that can alter a production as they go along, particularly when the source material hasn't ended when the adaptation starts, leading new material being written quickly, leading to shows becoming very erratic as they reach their final episodes, and a lot of disappointed viewers who are heartbroken by shows they're getting into failing by their endings. With the show only covering a small arch of the original light novels that was already completed, Baccano! is incredibly organised and manages to keep an eye on every little plot point carefully, playing games with the viewer even on rewatches because of how planned out its storytelling clearly was.

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Bookended by the man who runs the journalist group, with him discussing in the first episode with a very young female assistant about who the lead character should be or whether one is actually needed, the show has no qualms with usurping one's expectations with events and characters in each episode, dripping feeding the missing parts of the chronology as it goes along. The show even goes as far as dropping a major plot conclusion in the opening credits sequence which plays in all the episodes just to mess with viewers, taking a complicated story and purposely plots it in a way that's clever when you carefully examine it all. On rewatches, information still appears in ways in terms of plotting that you didn't expect, which helps you come to appreciate how economic the show is for such complicated storytelling, simple and to the point when it covers the information it needs to. Thankfully the show makes sure one is never confused as long as you're alert, recapping pieces of information in fact for episodes which specifically adds more to that plot point, and making sure each time change has a chapter page of the year its set during every time to make things easier to follow.

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It helps as well how memorable the characters are. Even if some of the names are utterly silly for what are supposed to be mainly Italian-American or at least American characters - Jacuzzi Splot and Nice Holystone the most extreme - it helps greatly that everyone is distinct visually, and in their dialogue and mannerisms. With this show in fact this is some of the best voice acting from Japanese cast I've probably heard in a television programme, particularly when you get to the more flamboyant characters like Ladd Russo (voiced by Keiji Fujiwara) who get some of the most memorable dialogue, the script for this (if the English subtitles are accurate translations) one of the best I've also seen for an anime show in terms of having personality and fun to it alongside the characters' behaviour, its more flamboyant dialogue and monologue far from the stereotype of exposition and bland dialogue that can plague other anime but with artistic and funny flourishes to it that gives all the characters memorable things to say, allowing them to steal scenes from each other as actors in live action films can.

From http://www.mangas-arigatou.org/forum/attachment.php?aid=4671

In terms of subverting expectations as well, the show does so as well in terms of the viewer's moral compass. Baccano!, in a warning for some readers of this, can be gruesomely violent at points especially when you have characters who can come back from death constantly; moments in the show are absolutely not for the squeamish, justifying the 18 certificate it has for UK physical releases and its emphasised by the show getting away with making its outright sociopaths in the cast charismatic and even likable. For characters who are absolutely pure - Isaac and Miria more likely to steal the door off a museum than rob an innocent bystander, or target a bad person in their childish view of heroics - there's plenty like Ladd Russo himself whose twisted view of the world manages to make them fascinating even if they are sadistic to an extreme. One even gets a romantic subplot alongside a skewered high moral code to enforce this, leading to one of the strangest moments in an anime, out of a rom-com, where they ask a female character on romantic advise despite the other having seen them previously cover in gore. The series manages to get away with this especially as, in terms of the plot, the true villain of the piece Szilard Quates is shown to be even more evil especially in what he does throughout the plot.

From http://www.animacity.ru/sites/default/files/anime-frames/1/frame-2_43.jpg

Technical Details:

Tonally, despite its fantastical story and absurd characteristics, Baccano! is depicted as realistically as possible with certain flights of fantasy allowed. Researched locations of old New York are depicted with realistic looking character designs populating them, an exaggerated take on American culture but one that gets the vibe right for classic gangster films right down to the classy jazz score. The only issue is the visibility of some of the animation's seems at places, particularly where CGI is used for dimension, which can be distracting once you notice it, but the rest is beautifully depicted, fitting the tone with its back alley streets and the claustrophobic nature of the Flying Pussyfoot train. As well with the complicated plot structure, the style helps in terms of making sure everyone sticks out as unique, alongside their personality quirks, and keep the viewer from becoming confused in terms of where each event that takes place is located.  

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

Story wise, Baccano! is normal. It's a peculiar take on American gangsters which brings in fantasy tropes into its plot, going as far back as a few centuries in the plot for one episode; the kind of genre mixing I can fall in love with easily, but it's not strange in terms of a plot choice in terms of the overall tone, fitting its logic and never coming off as strange. What's more significant is the way this plot is structured, causing it to be extremely difficult to talk about without spoiling too much but also leads it to having abstract qualities. The structure leads to a constant shifting in time back and forth, and even leads to the reality of two different places being compacted together - Chane's father able to communicate to her telepathically from his jail cell a far way away - purposely wrong footing viewers as a result as it drip feeds new details in what you see, replaying scenes from different angles or purposely clipping parts of them off until later in the episodes. What makes this style work is that Baccano! makes sure all its plot points are covered; even if it takes three bonus episodes to finish it all, introducing the memorably deranged character Graham Specter for a tiny story, it covers all the main plot points fully in the first thirteen and uses the straight-to-DVD episodes brilliantly to cover every small detail to could've lead to plot holes and allows full closure for the world (something that could benefit quite a few anime television programmes, Kill La Kill (2013-4) another greater example of a show using one bonus episode to wrap a tiny bow around everything).  Because of this perfectly made structure, it qualifies as abstract because it's able to undermine expectations of what a plot should be chronologically with its unconventional tone and makes it rewarding in its presentation.

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Personal Opinion:

Viewed as a gem of late 2000s anime, Baccano! is a very rewarding work. Unconventional even next to a lot of anime series - anime that's western set and influenced is more of a niche even if Western fans have a habit of celebrating the best of them - its mix of an unpredictable plot style and its extreme moments of violence does make it stand out. A lot of why it succeeds as well is its charisma not only in terms of the characters depicted themselves but the tone, always even when someone's head gets pushed into moving railway tracks to have a jaunty, playful style to it able to get away with its unconventional presentation. Particularly now as the original light novel series is getting translated into English for release, I hope that the fan base Baccano! starts to grow over this next year or so as it's an inventive, even innovative, work that's an absolute riot to view.

Street Trash (1987)

From http://www.adventuresinpoortaste.com/wp-content
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Director: J. Michael Muro

Screenplay: Roy Frumkes

Cast: Mike Lackey (as Fred); Bill Chepil (as Bill The Cop); Vic Noto (as Bronson); Mark Sferrazza (as Kevin); Jane Arakawa (as Wendy)

Synopsis: The streets of New York. Cheap, spoiled hooch sold in a liquor store causes anyone who drinks it to melt into multi-coloured goo, and at a local car junkyard a sociopath named Bronson (Noto), a former Vietnam war veteran, rules with violence causing a local cop Bill (Chepil) to be snapping at his heels. Amongst such atrocities as a severed penis being used as a catch ball, spontaneous human meltdowns and a gangster Nick Duran (Tony Darrow) wanting revenge for his girlfriend being found dead at the junkyard, two brothers Fred (Lackey) and Kevin (Sferrazza) attempt to survive in vagary in their house made of tires.

Street Trash is a film which requires caution for anyone not used to this type of exploitation cinema that deliberately strives for bad taste. While the retrospective documentary The Meltdown Memoirs (2006) does ease its more controversial content knowing a great deal of the cast looked back on the film with fondness, that should not deceive potential viewers that the experience is exactly like drinking a bottle of the tainted hooch in terms of how raw it can be. In terms of American cult cinema, I am finding myself drawn towards a unique period that, while there were similarierly grimy films to be found in the sixties and so forth, really starts in terms of the specific mood I'm interested in from the late seventies to the end of the eighties, or at least to Frank Henenlotter's Frankenhooker (1990). Particularly with New York set films, before the mayoral election of Rudy Giuliani as mayor lead to what many documentaries on grindhouse cinema called the "clean up" of the city, this type of cinema which were blurry in what genre they all existed in had a potency to them, feeling like taking a stroll on the real streets with the pimps and small hoods, and occassionally even a swan dive into the gutter of humanity whilst they were there. Technically films existed before including highly regarded works like Taxi Driver (1976), but in terms of genre cinema which was thriving at this time, something like Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer (1979) is the start of it for me. Ferrara himself and the aforementioned Henenlotter were putting out a lot of films in this style, amongst other directors, but you also have one-offs plotted through the eighties like Buddy Giovinazzo's Combat Shock (1984) and Street Trash itself, films which even in lurid plotting and exaggerated realities still filmed on real run-down streets and dealt with subjects like traumatised Vietnam War vets and the sex industry, even if glibly, that serious dramatic cinema were.

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Street Trash is superficial with its subject of homelessness, something that has to be pointed out after that paragraph to avoid confusion, connecting more to the splatstick subgenre of splatter and humour that came about in the mid eighties with a really sick humour. You cannot argue like with a film like Combat Shock that this has more on its mind. But with all these films I've mentioned, even the fact that they bring in this type of content and grime laced atmosphere still gives them a credibility, enveloping the viewer in the environments and dirt of the locations here as it wallows in its own filth. Unusually, Street Trash is largely set in the broad daylight, but that doesn't stop the (clearly real) dilapidated locations and wasteland from feeling like verité realism even with its deliberately schlocky subject matter taking place in the locations. This is definitely the case with how Street Trash is freewheeling in terms of plot as well, more of a variety of characters - the rundown, the physically disabled or drink stuporous, the ones with frayed sanities  - and strange atrocities rather than a clear narrative drive, very much the thing that will also put off people alongside the content itself. Unlike other films which are deliberately arch and gleefully mucking around in tastelessness however, there's a greater sense of personality here even in its exceptional crass even in end credit names. It's a film where the cast feels like they've walked off the streets which many actually did, from Bill the cop being played by Bill Chepil, an actual former cop, to former nightclub performer Tony Darrow as a gangster who with James Lorinz, playing a doorman and also the lead in Frankenhooker, steal the film whenever they're onscreen with largely improvised dialogue. Unlike some of the mainsteam genre films from this time, this film even with an absurd premise feels far more realistic in tone through its casting, the low budget and on-location choices.

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Street Trash has a lot that could easily offend still. The melt sequences while gross are actually gleeful spectacles of practical effects and rainbow slime; no matter how gross they are, they're far more humorous in an incredibly twisted way especially with the ingenuity with depicting them onscreen.. It's the other infamous moments which are likely to be problematic and difficult to defend, such as a woman (Miriam Zucker) being brought to the junkyard drunk for a casual sex romp, only to be (off-camera) gang raped and killed, her body involved in a gruesome joke afterwards. This sort of scene is understandably problematic, even if it's meant to deliberately transgress. A great deal of this issue is that a film like this is stuck swimming against the tide with what else was taking place in this era, works with not helped by being part of the tide of works from this era with far less qualities and little to defend unlike Street Trash which had worse attitudes about women and did similar scenes; Street Trash even if defendable stuck in the current alongside the literal trash by covering the same ground. Whether you could defend the scene or not, a film like Street Trash that desires to offend everyone on purpose suffers from the social context of when it was made when people made comments seriously that were reprehensibly misogynistic without, making the act of defending a film like it even more difficult. It does soften the blow and put an entirely new perspective on the entirety of Street Trash having seen The Meltdown Memoirs though, both in how actress Zucker has a prominent role in the doc as a talking head, with no shame about the small role, and in small details of how, when she had to lay naked on the side of a "toxic" river in the gruesome after scene, women in the film crew were stood on a hill off-camera to make sure she was okay during the filming. It complicates what these troublesome scenes mean, both in their desire to attack the viewer through transgression, and how in this case the production filming the scenes with actors role-playing and the scenes in context on-screen contrast drastically from each other, complicating the morality involved. This as much applies to other potential problematic issues such as how the homeless are depicted and the various forms of mutilation and chaos that are likely to offend people throughout the movie.

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Technical Details:

One of the most pronounced aspects of Street Trash as an exploitation film is its technical quality. Notably, director Jim Munro invested in a Steadicam before the film started to be pre-produced and honed his own skill in handling one when such technology was new for cinema, he himself using the camera and leading to some incredible moments involving gliding camera moments you never expect in this type of cinema. Munro, after only directing this film, went on to become one of the most prolific cinematographers and Steadicam operators in mainstream cinema, from the films of James Cameron to Kevin Costner's Open Range (2003) as a result of the practice he shows here. Generally, for a low budget production, pains were clearly made to bring a high technical quality to the whole film. From storyboarding scenes to the elaborate and incredibly gross melt sequences, Street Trash is a whole calibre higher in quality than a lot of this type of genre cinema; compare it to something from around the same time like Class of Nuke 'Em High (1986) - flat cinematography, constant blaring of cheap glam metal, lack sure presentation - the carefully crafted nature of this film, even if it's just as grimy, is incredibly noticeable.

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

The one debate with rating this is whether "weird" has to qualify as a mood that disorientates the viewer or if seeing a hobo melt into a toilet is enough to qualify for the list. The issue with the latter is that this has to be a consistent, constant experience, were sights never expected to be seen on-screen are seen, to be "abstract". For a person who has never seen a film like Street Trash before, it would be an incredibly weird experience in parts not to mention shocking. But the series of events that take are is more shocking that bizarre to experience, merely the poisoned hooch leading to anything remotely strange consistently particularly with how the melting is depicting in bright primary colours specific to each victim's scene, by themselves memorable just for their bright coloured gristliness. The rest is far more a gritty and sickly hilarious series of memorable characters and events, such following the likes of Burt (Clarenze Jarmon), a friend of the main brothers who tries sneaking chicken and food from a grocery store in his trousers in a memorable scene, to Bronson the main villain, who keeps a knife made from a human thigh bone and has the only other moment that could be close to "abstract", a nightmare about Vietnam where he's attached by vampire Vietcong and has erotic desires for a captive he finds, the film managing to make a location in the East Coast of the US look like an appropriately nightmarish location for a battleground.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Psychotronic

Abstract Tropes: Body Horror; Transgression; Melting Body Parts; Genital Mutilation; Bad Taste; Wallowing in Filth

From http://www.freewebs.com/september-java/street%20trash.JPG

Personal Opinion:

Unless you're prepared to see Street Trash or have been warned what to expect, I advise caution with viewing the film even for splatter fans. The film was intended to be like scrapping the bottom of the barrel and whilst there are moments that are cheesy, there's still a lot of this which feels like inserting one's head into an un-flushed toilet in a public bathroom even in the present day. It was a film I didn't like at all when I first saw it, but Street Trash has gained a grimy quality both for the charisma behind this seediness and the exceptional technical craft that put it all together. The likes of Street Trash could never be made again and a great deal of this is to do with the character of these films in appearance and tone; rundown, economically effected environments could be found to film at, but it would have a different tone to it from the cultural and social changes that have taken place since the eighties, let alone the influence of technology, leaving a film like this one as something utterly distinct even if it has a bitter taste to it.

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

From https://ladygeekgirl.files.wordpress.com/2015/
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Directors: Eric Radomski and Bruce W. Timm

Screenplay: Alan Burnett, Paul Dini, Martin Pasko and Michael Reaves

(Voice) Cast: Kevin Conroy (as Batman/Bruce Wayne); Dana Delany (Andrea Beaumont); Hart Bochner (Arthur Reeves); Stacy Keach (Carl Beaumont); Abe Vigoda (as Salvatore Valestra); Mark Hamill (The Joker)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #21

Because of what the horror genre tackles - notions of dread, death, decay, the prevailing sense of the ethereal and haunted but also the emotional baggage left behind by it - it's possible for other genres to blur into it or entirely take tropes and moods from it. Batman is a particularly great example of this as a franchise. While I have a growing interest in superheroes, I still prefer Japanese manga and anime in many cases and, when it comes to DC Comics¹, Batman is only one of two franchises I've any interest in, the other not even Superman².Batman is arguably the best superhero ever to be created, and I argue it's as much how flexible to character and world is to various genres as it is that world and its characters. The original character created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger is openly based on the detective films of the period it was created in and pulp characters that existed before, horror found in aspects such as the bat costume to strike fear into criminals and the Joker being inspired by the film The Man Who Laughs (1928). Almost every risk with the world has been successful in keeping it relevant - pure camp with Adam West became as iconic as the serious version of the character; rundown science fiction succeeded through Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (1986); realism through Christopher Nolan's trilogy; even unexpected takes like adding Cthulhu -like mythos in The Doom That Came To Gotham (2000-1), a one-off comic I've recently read penned by Mike "Hellboy" Mignola, work because the characters allow it. (Only full blown sci-fi in Batman Beyond is still sketchy for myself unless I find a great story set in the world. Ironically it's The Big O (2001-3), a two series anime show made by people who worked on the nineties Batman animated series who wanted to pay tribute to it, that shows how Batman in the future could work with noir tropes next to giant robots.)

Horror naturally fits Batman like a hand in a velvet glove, be it Batman himself or villains like the Scarecrow, and while Mask of the Phantasm is a superhero genre film rather than full horror cinema, it gladly seeped a PG child friendly animation with gloom and darkness as a grim reaper figure known as the Phantasm targets gangsters for punishment, Batman blamed for the crimes when the figure disappears into mist and bodies are left. A large part of my love for Batman is nostalgia for the critically acclaimed animated series from the early nineties I grew up with; while I need to return to it, I still at an impressionable age realised the drastic bar in quality the show had, and how adult it was in tone, next to the cartoons I was also watching back then. Revisiting Mask of the Phantasm as an adult, it's a deeply melancholic tale where the Phantasm figure interconnects with the tale of the one woman in Bruce Wayne's life who vanished and broke his heart, the remaining heartache it causes relevant to the current plot. Starting with images of Gotham's skyscrapers and composer Shirley Walker going for the most operatic opening theme possible, one of the only animated theatrical released for a DC Comics franchise is still stupendous and feels like a proper, adult film with emotion to it.

It is strange realise though, when I grew up believing the nineties animated series was set in a contemporary day of the show's own logic, that this version in Mask of the Phantasm is technically a period piece set in the forties, one of the big factors to why the show had such an effect on me being its period aesthetic, an art deco tone of forties noir films and grand architecture that would explain how I became obsessed with aesthetics in cinema and popular media as I did as an adult. With this film some fifties diesel punk aesthetic is added for its own narrative, a retro ray gun tone found in a World of Tomorrow exhibition that plays an important part of Bruce Wayne's (Kevin Conroy) relationship with Andrea Beaumont (Dana Delany), a character who returns to his life, and the place the Joker (Mark Hamil) occupies in its desolated form years after. The general style of the Batman franchise, how important the city of Gotham was, helped ground the story and make the character accessible whilst also giving carte blanche for broad, expressionist stylisation; even Joel Schumacher's films, even if you think he vomited neon onto everything, had a sense of style to them that had character even if the rest of the films horrified other viewers.

In terms of covering this film under the scope of horror, its surprisingly dark for a family friendly film, as an adult amazed that in less than eighty minutes that it manages to create such an emotional deep, macabre tale of lost love. Against showing the early beginnings of Bruce Wayne as a vigilante and the creation of Batman, it emphasises the emotional sacrifice of the position against the tragedy of Andrea's life. The figure of Phantasm is straight out of horror cinema, terrorising targets including an extended scene in a graveyard which emphasises death even if in a way suitable for a young audience. Like with the original animated series from the nineties, going only from memory, it's surprising how much Mask of the Phantasm and this version of Batman got away with in terms of adult concepts such as death, managing like old forties cinema to convey grim content without explicitly dealing with it, more so when you also have a figure like the Joker that is both a comedic figure but, through Hamil's incredible vocal performance, absolutely terrifying even in this more comedic version. Stuff in this film, even implied, with Joker is still gruesome to even consider next to when the late Heath Ledger played the character and did his magic trick with a pencil.

The flashback heavy tale itself really has a deep emotional level to it, Andrea only a character connected to this one story but weaved carefully into it that she could easily have been canonical to the franchise, having an immense effect on the mythology in this plot. The danger that this type of pulp character, like any superhero, is that it can become predictable if little changes, negated by how this is, balanced between moments of comedy and drama, takes a successful risk in having a drama in the midst of the plot.

From http://thebatmanuniverse.net/image/Movie/History/Animated/Batman-Mask%20of%20Phantasm%20(1993)/Screenshots/Batman
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¹. Vertical comics are an entirely different case I separate from DC Comics.

². The other is Green Lantern. All my knowledge is Wikipedia and that awful Ryan Reynolds film, but the premise's potential for weird cosmic stories is appealing alongside with the world. Only the terrible sounding villains outside of the mythos of various colour spectrums of lantern rings sounds like it's going to be off-putting. With Superman, it's not only how too invulnerable the character is but how unappealing any of his nemeses are outside of Lex Luthor are that I have little interesting, and I was someone who grew up enjoying Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-7). 

The Raven (1963) [Mini Review]

From https://i.jeded.com/i/the-raven-1963.32489.jpg

Director: Roger Corman

Screenplay: Richard Matheson

Cast: Vincent Price (as Dr. Erasmus Craven); Peter Lorre (as Dr. Adolphus Bedlo); Boris Karloff (as Dr. Scarabus); Hazel Court (as Lenore Craven); Olive Sturgess (as Estelle Craven); Jack Nicholson (as Rexford Bedlo)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #20

The Raven is one of the few Corman adaptations of Edgar Ellen Poe that's deliberately humorous. One of the best things about these adaptations is that, while fun, they took themselves seriously. The Raven is different in terms of having its tongue in its cheek but because it's still depicted with sincerity, the result is entirely riveting. The original poem of The Raven is merely an opening catalist to start a completely unique story, more drastic than the other Poe adaptations I've seen from this series in changing the original narrative, where isolated but humble magician Dr. Erasmus Craven (Price) lets a raven into his study only to find soon after that it can talk. The raven, once helped by magic, is revealed to be fellow magician and alcohol enthusiast Dr. Adolphus Bedlo (Lorre), turned into a bird after a duel with the sinister leader of the main magician's guild Dr. Scarabus (Karloff), whose maleficent reputation is matched by the possibility he has captured the soul of Craven's late wife Lenore (Court) and made her his possession, leading Craven and his daughter Estelle (Sturgess), alongside Bedlo and his son Rexford (Nicholson) to head to Scarabus' castle.

There's a great sense with The Raven that everyone is having fun while contributing said energy to great performances. Playing a hero for once in these Poe films for Corman, Price is so affable and a gentleman it's not surprising this his real off-screen personality effectively comes through, Craven the warm milk drinking man hesitant to get involved with Scarabus but pressed on to do so through Price giving him nobility rather than plot contrivance. Some might find Lorre's bumbling, drunken Bedlo an embarrassment for the actor, near the end of his life, but for me personally (in drastic contrast to the opinion of Harun Farocki's documentary The Double Face of Peter Lorre (1984)) this doesn't come off as an insult to Lorre but a talented actor gladly throwing himself into a lovable buffoon with decent material. Other actors had worse ends to their careers, such as Karloff sadly, who here thankfully gets to play menacing but by a grace without need for going over-the-top, the elegance of his performance even for slapstick a reminder the most beloved actors in horror cinema then and now had theatre experience or had worked in areas which had them flex their acting talents, not to mention a natural nobility to many of them away from the camera. Add to this Court vamping it up, and chewing more scenery than Price, Karlof and Lorre combined, and a very young Jack Nicholson in a role that surprises knowing where he'd be a decade on, at one point showing the stereotypical mannerisms when possessed while driving a horse driven coach but effectively playing the slightly bumbling son figure to Lorre.

Also significant is how Corman emphasised a clear quality to these films technically. Having Richard Matheson, legendary author and the man who penned the Poe films that came before this one helps, as does the rich production design onscreen. Still low budget, Corman's decision to use the money used to make two smaller films to make one Technicolor work with distinct sets helped immensely, the gothic look of the film elegant even in a film like this that's exceptionally goofy at points, the colour especially restored for Blu-Ray as well immensely appealing for this type of story. While it has significantly less of the psychedelic colours and none of the dream sequences of other Poe films, the distinct style is pitched at a quality above a lot of substandard colour horror films at this point in the sixties which couldn't use any of this then-new aesthetic properly. Even the antiquated magic effects have a handmade charm especially in the final magician's duel which comes off as a series of Looney Tunes punch lines one-after-another. It's with the serious tone here that, even if it has the likes of Price and Lorre involved in comedic pratfalls, it never becomes obnoxious irony and retains a respectability that makes the humour and chills work.

From https://horrorpediadotcom.files.wordpress.com
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Tower of Evil (1972) [Mini Review]

From https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/17
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Director: Jim O'Connolly

Screenplay: Jim O'Connolly

Cast: Bryant Haliday (as Evan Brent); Jill Haworth (as Rose Mason); Anna Palk (as Nora Winthrop); William Lucas (as Superintendent Hawk); Anthony Valentine (as Dr. Simpson)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #19

A proto-slasher set on Snape Island - where four American youths go to only to almost all be killed barring a catatonic survivor - a group of archaeologists go to said island when this incident reveals the possible discovery of Phoenician artefacts, but at the possible cost of being bumped off by whoever killed most of the American group. It's surprisingly explicit for its era in terms of a British horror film - nudity, graphic murders including decapitation - but it's still incredibly bland, a lack of grace or ill-ease found here where for all this it still feels stilted. Snape Island and its central lighthouse in the middle of its land should evoke nautical dread but instead you have a lot of actors speaking bland exposition in groups without any sense of atmosphere to the environment. For all its transgression only the dialogue of Nora (Palk), a disgruntled and adulterous wife of one of the archaeologists, really still has teeth in it in how sexually open she is in her words, the only real entertainment to be found in how blunt she is to everyone in front of her husband despite the fact the character should arguably be hateable.

The datedness even by this period - what teen goes to a jazz festival even in 1971? - is worse when the survivor of the first attack is barely used, only within post-psychedelic psychological experiments which are meant to bring back her memories of the original attack that involve a lot of over large, flashing disco lights. The threat at the end, only spoiling part of the end, partially involves a man with a beard and dungarees, that hasn't washed for months, who is the leas threatening horror bogeyman you could get, undermining Tower of Evil further. Sandwiched between films like Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973), too many British horror movies are like this one in how lack sure they are, missing the potential in their premises and dragging along in spite of the sex and gore they started adding.  

From https://horrorpediadotcom.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/
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See No Evil (1971) [Mini Review]

From http://www.ukhorrorscene.com/
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Director: Richard Fleischer

Screenplay: Brian Clemens

Cast: Mia Farrow (as Sarah); Dorothy Alison (as Betty Rexton); Robin Bailey (as George Rexton); Diane Grayson (as Sandy Rexton); Brian Rawlinson (as Baxter)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #18

See No Evil on paper is a potentially great pot boiler thriller. Sarah (Farrow) is a young woman who has lost her eyesight and is learning to cope with her new life with blindness while staying at her uncle's home in England. A sociopath venture up to the home and Fleischer does exactly what one would want from a premise like this. No overbearing music that spoils the moment or jump scares. Instead there's a slow and lingering sense of dread. Fleischer lets small details - glass on the kitchen tiles, a wrist chain on the floor - give the sense of something having gone wrong with the vulnerability of Sarah, having to use her hands to travel around, leaving the viewer with immediate fear for her. Punctured with a subplot about an old suitor Steve (Norman Eshley) trying to rekindle their romance, it actually helps build up the concern when finally the events that have taken place are shown in a matter-of-fact way, a camera pan to the left or the frame being pulled back revealing the horror of what's happened. The perfect way to make a thriller.

Sadly See No Evil while a technical gem for a thriller dwindles in interest after this. While the presentation is perfect, including its natural photography for rural English countryside and wasteland, the story doesn't build up well enough even for a simple pot boiler under ninety minutes. Briefly there's a concern that it's going to become anti-gypsy in attitude, which does turn out to just be a plot twist based on the characters' prejudices thankfully, but it doesn't help that the killer when they're revealed is merely a McGuffin than someone compelling visually or in performance. (Neither does it help that, to try to make them evil, they're established at the beginning by having them come out of a cinema with a double bill including "Rape Cult" in the matinee or having their feet on the seats in a pub. The later is just bad manners, and especially in seventies Britain let alone now, you couldn't get away with a film title like "Rape Cult" in English cinemas like old American grindhouses could.) The film seems far more interesting in equestrian content in fact that the thrills at points, obsessed with horses and riding them even if it leads to an escape by way of one. While its short length is perfect for a sharp, creepy narrative the plot needed more meat on its bone to make the ending better.

From http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/wp-content/
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Friday the 13th Part II (1981) [Mini Review]

From http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/fridaythe13th/images/
f/fe/Friday2.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20151028234713

Director: Steve Miner

Screenplay: Ron Kurz and Phil Scuderi

Cast: Amy Steel (as Ginny Field); John Furey (as Paul Holt); Adrienne King (as Alice Hardy); Warrington Gillette (as Jason Voorhees); Walt Gorney (as Crazy Ralph)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #17

Regardless of my opinion of the first Friday the 13th, I'll actively remind myself continually that Part 2 is a significantly better film than the original. A great deal of my problems with the original are completely excised and replaced with something significantly better. The feel of the seventies is still here and, more so than the first, the backwoods atmosphere is significantly more palpable here. Having scenes in the broad daylight that are tension building, not just for blank dialogue like the first, really helps emphasising that no one is safe, and the lush American woodlands here is even more atmospheric distinct. Rather than just a set the woodland here in the sequel is both a beautiful place but also dangerous without killers in it with bears and dark passages in the middle of it. If anything it does signpost that Steve Miner is significantly better than Sean S. Cunningham at least in terms of these Friday the 13th films in direction, at least in the sense that when you get a prolonged moment of a kettle boiling on a stove its actually used to build up dread rather than wasting time like in the first.

Another huge advantage is that the characters are actually likable. There's some strange aspects - Muffin the dog is cute, but I wasn't expecting a full blown theatrical reveal for her at the end of the film usually expected for non-canine human beings - but there're characters here that are so much more interesting to the point you actually care for them, a rarity in slashes that's a significant advantage for this one. Amy Steel, with the best surname for a final girl actress, is so much more charismatic and given a character in Ginny whose more rewarding - resilient with intelligence but with clear grit to her. That grit drastically contrasts that obnoxious virgin parallel with final girls in these films, something clearly obvious in how she basks with a beer at the bar, with the attitude of a  grown woman, contemplating the possible innocence of Jason Voorhees before everything went wrong for his family. All the characters are likable even if they're one note, to the point one's death is actually tragic connected to how everything was looking great for them, done in at such a cruel moment and in a rare moment for a slasher you actually feel pain for their death.

There's still flaws sadly but they're more things that should've been fixed rather than sabotaging the film completely. Harry Manfredini's score is still overbearing to a detriment. The chase scenes in the last act as well, while far more engaging, do become repetitious; I've always found the more slower, dramatic moments in horror cinema more engaging, chase scenes unless you're the best like in Halloween (1978) or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) always in danger of coming more off like action scenes than something for the horror genre, meant to be more contemplative or moody unless you get the tone right. Crazy Ralph (Gorney), from the first film, is a comical character who doesn't work, like a parody of a character from a horror film, but he thankfully only has a small role before [spoiler] he thankfully buys the farm. and, while the controversy over this film taking scenes from Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood (1971) are not that problematic for me, the censorship to the film scuppers the recreation of the spear scene from the first film to an immense detriment.

Thankfully everything else is solid, a lot more done right here. The opening sequence, crushing the hopes of the fans of the first film and effectively crushing the prequel at the same time, does work as it appropriate sets up how no one is safe. Having likable characters helps build up fear as much as having a villain who is far more a prescience throughout the film from the beginning; borrowing the sack from The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976) helps as does having a hulking figure in the shadows who is both clumsy, not safe when a chair collapses to pieces under him like for anyone, but still dangerous and resourceful. The sense that this feels more darker and sinister than the first film helps a lot, where even a sense of a character wetting themselves in fear doesn't come off as tasteless but a moment of anxiety before pulling themselves together. The only regret with this film is that it's stuck to the first like a Siamese twin. Despite the extensive use of prequel footage, you're stuck knowing that the first film has to exist to enjoy this one, and the fact that this ends up with a confused chronology as a result of doing this yet undermining plot points from the first to get a better narrative does cause a headache if you think about it too much. Unfortunately like many sequels, the timeline and mythology of the franchise was already existing in parallel dimensions from the second film onwards but at least Friday the 13th Part II is a significantly better work that can be enjoyed by itself, the prequel preferably buried somewhere to be forgotten for me while this did the premise better. 

From http://static.wixstatic.com/media/ff562f
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