Halloween (2007)

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Director: Rob Zombie

Screenplay: Rob Zombie (with credit to John Carpenter and Debra Hill)

Cast: Malcolm McDowell (as Dr. Samuel Loomis); Daeg Faerch/Tyler Mane (as Michael Myers, Age 10/Adult); Sheri Moon Zombie (as Deborah Myers); Scout Taylor-Compton (as Laurie Strode); Danielle Harris (as Annie Brackett); Brad Dourif (as Sheriff Lee Brackett)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #76

After Halloween: Resurrection (2002), a drastic change was required to attempt to sustain the franchise but the result was incredibly divisive. It didn't help that by this point, remakes were already looked down upon in spite of the trend being with us, in terms of announcements rather than just those that actually got made, for a while in the 2000s and still to this day. The additional area of divide was how the distinct auteur behind this remake, Rob Zombie, who does deserve the auteur banner even if you hate his films, would take a very different direction for the series. Rob Zombie is someone I am split upon - on one side, White Zombie and his shock metal career is peachy, whilst the more experimental he's been as a film maker (The Lords of Satan (2012)), the more rewarding he is. On the other side however, an attempt to rewatch The Devil's Rejects (2005) last year was given up on fifteen minutes into the film for it being vile for the sake of vile and being like the worst music video grotesquery being vomited onto my eyes. Halloween 2007 is split itself in the middle, a sign of what Zombie can do when he's motivated, but with also the various flaws which have led people to hate him.

The most controversial choice is to humanise Michael Myers. It could have been a terrible decision, especially as in less than fifteen minutes it piles on obvious conventions for a serial killer film, of how young Michael (Daeg Faerch) has a terrible childhood, with an abusive step father (William Forsythe) and a loving mother Deborah (Sheri Moon Zombie) who's career as a stripper however gets him mocked by bullies at school, already killing his pet rat Elvis and other small animals when the narrative starts and becoming more sociopathic in an almost amnesiac state of lashing out. However this is part of Halloween the remake eventually becomes brilliant. It jars completely against Michael Myers as the mysterious force that suddenly appeared from suburbia, the issue with remaking the 1978 film in the first place, but when it gets to the middle chapter, after a horrifying mass murder, Michael in incarceration with Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) as his therapist, there's actual emotional depth to the scenes thanks to Faerch, McDowell and Sherry Moon's performances, making it compelling as Michael starts to regress, hiding behind masks he creates in his cell, until it leads him turning entirely into a cold blooded hulk of a killer as an adult (Tyler Mane). Even though he has a grimy and seventies worshipping aesthetic, and likes to write characters constantly swearing and screening in the dialogue, it's here Zombie manages to have some maturity to the material, a slow burn especially in the extended Director's Cut I viewed which works to make his decision to explore how a killer is created a mindful direction to have taken.

The issues are when Zombie actually has to remake John Carpenter's original film. His mix of incredible transgressive and sobering violence against a post-modern carnival of pop-culture doesn't really work with what is meant to be a serious drama, lunging into ultraviolent slashing with a split personality. There's points where the violence is questionable in terms of dramatic states, such as how Myers finally escapes his incarceration in the institution because of two orderlies raping a female patient in his cell next to him, or some of the later deaths which linger on the pain for a length of time. Also the pop culturally heavy presentation jars against what came before. At first it's subtle in the background, working perfectly. The pop culture is literally in the background or a song on the radio, whilst the cameos from the likes of the late Richard Lynch to Sybil Danning work because they're playing characters, whilst cameos, placed well into the drama surrounding them. After the film becomes an actually Halloween remake, it like listening to a three disc driving anthem compilation - Rush's Tom Sawyer to Blue Öyster Cult's (Don't Fear) the Reaper from the original film - and going to an entire guest list of a horror and cult film convention in terms of the cameos - Udo Kier, Ken Foree, Clint Howard, Sid Haig - which jars against the very grim and bleak narrative set up originally.

It particularly jars in how the first half, even with clichés and sickening violence, was such a slow burn, the casting of someone like McDowell actually a godsend in how, playing a Dr. Loomis who goes from wanting to help Michael to a money grabbing shill because he failed to help the boy, he brings emotional heft, as does Sheri Moon Zombie as an underrated actress in her husband's films. Even something that could be glib like casting Danny Trejo as an institution orderly actually works because he's with a subtle performance with a through line to it rather than a single scene for him to be recognised as Danny Trejo. After the first half, having to absorb extreme violence and a lurid view on sex and nudity at the same time, this succession of cameos and musical choices becomes much more disjointed.

It doesn't help either that the final half, the actually Halloween remake, for its few moments of virtue is rushed, badly stuck between remaking full moments from the first film to being its own work. Scout Taylor-Compton and a returning, adult Danielle Harris do their best, but they don't have a lot of screen time in the slightest, so much so Kristina Klebe as the PJ Soles' character from the original film is sadly not worth mentioned more on because she's barely in the film. Zombie finds himself stuck, despite a curious attempt to write sassy and expletive filled dialogue for women you'd expected Diablo Cody to pen, trying to remake Carpenter's first film in an ultimately doomed act.  Both with co-writer Debra Hill humanising the dialogue and Carpenter's classical Hollywood directing style, Zombie's attempting to fill out a slim, perfect technical masterpiece in the 1978 Halloween is bound to be a mess.

In general the actual remake in the last half feels like it was something Zombie had little interest in having to do, the result turning in a dreary, nasty slog. If he had made his own film, even if it had to be a Halloween movie, entirely based on the first half it could've been successful, a debate that'll come ahead for myself revisiting Halloween II (2009) to close off the reviews of all the Halloween films, where he stopped caring about pandering to the franchise lore and swan-dived into his own canon. Instead this is an admirable failure crossed with a scrambled mess, utterly disappointing by the end but redeemed by how interesting the first half way before. It's certainly better than Halloween: Resurrection, and whilst it's a failure, it's amazing how violent some people's opinions on this 2007 film was consider when just five years before the franchise was decomposing.

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King of Thorn (2009)

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Director: Kazuyoshi Katayama

Screenplay: Hiroshi Yamaguchi and Kazuyoshi Katayama

(Voice) Cast: Kana Hanazawa (as Kasumi Ishiki); Akiko Yajima (as Timothy Laisenbach); Eri Sendai (as Shizuku Ishiki); Kenji Nomura (as Ron Portman); Sayaka Ohara (as Katherine Turner); Toshiyuki Morikawa (as Marco Owen)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #75

For the first time in a while, another anime which slides into horror, although in this case what I thought was a post-apocalyptic movie about a dangerous virus which turned people into stone and monsters rooming the Earth turned out to be something drastically different, involving allusions to fairy tales, sci-fi and a truck load of plot twists. If anything it shows how to never judge something from the initial plot synopsis let alone the cover.

Whether it actually works or not is to be found reading my review of King of Thorns here.

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Corpse Eaters (1974)

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Director: Donald R. Passmore and Klaus Vetter

Screenplay: Lawrence Zazelenchuk and Alan Nicholson

Cast: Michael Hopkins, Ed LeBreton, Terry London, Michael Krizanc, Helina Carson

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #74

Synopsis: A body comes to an undertaker's for their funeral preparations. The film goes back in time soon after to when this body was once a man, one of four friends who made the fatal decision to go to a graveyard and utter a black magic incantation in a mausoleum, causing the dead to rise.

I wasn't expecting Corpse Eaters to have anything of quality to it. It's not a good film but I wasn't expecting the fascinating oddity I saw like it either. This belongs to a category of cinema that has become more uncovered as the internet has made almost everything available and people are willingly find the most obscure of works, even instructional videos on VHS to z-grade horror films, if they develop an obsession with them. There's various different categories depending on the era they were made and/or other traits based on cultural origin to aesthetic - from the growing list of films for vaporwave fanatics to consume, to shot-on-video oddities from the eighties and even further afoot with Lollywood and Nigerian low budget genre cinema amongst many others. It confounds traditional notions of art, more so as it willingly includes masterpieces of cinema with audiovisual ephemera, and is more about the fan, and even educational institutions, exploring cultural past that they may have even been too young to have witnessed or are trying to preserve. Corpse Eaters belongs to the vast mass of exploitation cinema being made between the sixties to the early eighties but significantly, this isn't an American production but entirely Canadian, a zombie film which has a distinction as a result. It's the last thing you'd think of alongside the words "cultural past" but still firmly belongs to it with its quirks.

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It first becomes obvious this'll be a more unconventional viewing experience when the movie, under sixty minutes long, first informs the viewer that anyone of a nervous disposition will be warned of any moments of gore when a certain guttural drone, and a cut to a shot of an older balding man retching in a handkerchief, plays on-screen in a William Castle-like gimmick. Credit where it's due, just a few years before David Cronenberg would appall the Canadian film industry with Shivers (1975), this is a surprisingly nasty movie when the few moments of eye ball plucking and gut munching are seen, making the gimmick warning more pertinent. Corpse Eater's strangeness comes as much from its grubby nature too. Even if being viewed from a VHS-rip only, there's still a veil of slime and mud due to its low budget origins, that compensates for its lack of a real story. A sex scene, when the four main characters are finally are introduced, feels like a porn scene if the insert shots were replaced with snippets of an on looking owl in extreme close-up, emphasised as if it's watching the couple mid-coitus alongside the friends (one a sister of the one of the couple) sat just nearby on a cloth.

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There's an obvious issue impossible to ignore - ephemera unless it's an unsung gem or fascinating as a technically well made and/or historical artefact, can be haphazardly made in some cases - and with Corpse Eaters it's that when these four characters are introduced, a film with little time to spend suddenly drags miserably between that sex scene and the characters deciding where to go, deciding between a graveyard or a rock concert by pulling straws. Unfortunately horror cinema, alongside other problems, has always been crippled by the tendency for the creators of them trying to cast main characters for a young or even teenage audience with the usual results, even if these four are nearing their thirties with some proud moustaches on display, being utterly vacuums with drudgery instead of dialogue. It's a prolonged wait, even as someone whose appreciated Herschell Gordon Lewis' more filler related moments, and will even test the patience of die-hard exploitation film fans.

Bookmarking this problem however, it's a curious and peculiar viewing experience. The beginning quarter completely wrong foots the viewer with the type of presentation expected from an anthology film, following the undertaker introduced at the start out on a random drive in his car, an extended monologue taking place over the images of a car passing through the countryside about the absurdity of death and how he profits off it in a large and significant chunk of the running time. On the other side, the zombie attack caused by resurrecting the dead, requiring one incantation and making sure the nearby crucifix on the wall is turned upside down, is surprisingly brief, instead the fate of the main four character residing in an aftermath in a hospital that turns into a medical drama perpetuated by an openly woozy dream sequence, one of the most legitimately rewarding moments of the whole film in its strangeness. The exact finale itself returns back the undertaker for the most gruesome, if illogical, set of sequences within the funeral home with memorable drunk acting from the person playing the undertaker.

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Technical Detail:

Very low budget, it's more the homemade tone that's an aesthetic. It's a film that's pretty rudimentary in terms of production, and learning of its messy production history, what you take from Corpse Eaters is the same grubby tone you find in various exploitation films from this period. The project of a drive-in movie theatre owner and co-writer Lawrence Zazalenchuk, one which went through two directors and has rumours of additional footage exiting, it's admirable in terms of a scrappy production in spite of its mistakes.

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Weird

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

Corpse Eaters is not on the Abstract List but does belong to a bubbling mass of exploitation cinema from the American continent that could easily quality on the List and in itself is worthy of being scrutinised in this context, so much so a rewatch could easily lead Corpse Eaters to be added or at least some food for thought over its bizarre tone. It definitely exhibits various qualities appropriate for the weirder spectrum of exploitation and horror cinema from this period - oddly paced and with sharp tonal shifts, the droning electronic music, gimmicky presentations, editing that feels like it's still wet off the editing machine - a vast jumble of images that burn the mind.

Personal Opinion:

It's a shambolic mess but a compelling one for those with an acquired taste that excepts it's poor pace and major flaws. This is not praise for its flaws, accepting it on its own standards, more of finding its lunges to-and-fro in unexpected fascinating, so much so that its ending in a mental institution is apt to depict how nay viewer must feel seeing it for the first time.

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Black Magic (1975)

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Director: Ho Meng-Hua

Screenplay: Kuang Ni

Cast: Lung Ti (as Xu Nuo); Lieh Lo (as Lang Jiajie); Ni Tien (as Luo Yin); Lily Li (as Quming); Feng Ku (as Shan Jianmi)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #73

The only real regret with this Shaw Brothers chiller is that it's a pretty basic morality tale with a very bland black and white morality behind it. Folklore and fairytales in general have a clear cut distinction between good and evil, which is something never to complain about, but it's always a nuisance whether it's a genre film from a country known for prolific amounts of horror cinema (Japan, the US, Spain etc.) and those which you dig up as you explore other country's film cultures (Indonesia, India, Hong Kong) that the leads, unlike those in fairytales who can by usually ciphers for the readers/listeners, are so bland you could put a mannequin in their place, where the villains and side characters are what make a film like Black Magic utterly entertaining nonetheless alongside its depiction of the titular arts. Aside from this Black Magic was an utter hoot, another Hong Kong horror film that's been recently released in the United Kingdom which opens up the stranger tastes of Hong Kong horror cinema.

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The thing of greatest interest with Black Magic, why a film like it so much more better than a lot of modern horror films, is that it feels so much more transgressive in its viscous and lurid tone alongside having an internal logic mixed with this that's more compelling. Whether the mythology of the black magic is real or not, it's interesting that the good older wizard called upon to save the day, when the lead hunky male is brainwashed by magic for a rich and spoilt woman to have him as her boy toy, is also a black magic practitioner, suggesting evil here is dictated by an evil magician who provides death curses for gold jewellery and seduces female customers with his own magic. That and said logic in these Shaw Brothers horror films is one only found in their productions, the depiction of said magic is in its own distinct form you never forget.

The plot's got a few serpentine twists of interest - what starts off as a conman bum getting a love charm on the spoil rich woman leads to her hiring the same black magician for her own cause after the love charm works so successfully - but the real interest is witnessing the gruesome, strange sights of having to go to a graveyard to use the reanimated pus of a corpse for a spell, worms crawling under the skin next to someone's heart, bloody worms in a coconut used to curse someone with death if they don't pay up for the magician's services, and countless other macabre moments in a world where the worms are actual worms and even the plastic skull the villain has and waves around is still charmingly macabre, a sense of gross tangibility lost with CGI but found in international genre cinema from decades before.

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It's curious to see a company in Shaw Brothers, having martial arts films as their bread and butter, attempt other genres and awaiting to see if they ever slip into their comfort zone abruptly, a car chase suddenly happening the middle of the plot when you normally don't expect it in supernatural horror, and the ending in a construction site which brings in rotoscoped lightning, something that'd unfairly get mocked but for me here is Black Magic pulling out all the stops in context for a seventies film. Also the sense of mythology that the Shaw Brothers' martial arts films had, of mysterious fighting techniques and lore, does cross over into these horror films for very unexpected results, such as centipedes being a cure for love potion charms or how one needs the footprints of the target of interest, in the mud, as part of said love charms. The thing most likely to be the most notorious for new viewers to the film is how, also for a love charm, a female customer always has to provide their breast milk as a vital ingredient, something that's an excuse for nudity (body double or not) but, ironically, even if it's a lurid plot piece has far greater verisimilitude with real world magic in how fertility and symbols related to it do actually find themselves used in magical rituals or part of their ideologies, particularly with the emphasis on a strong Earth Mothers in modern paganism.

Admittedly there's two obvious issues with this view point watching a film like this, that one it'll be a crass reading from a foreigner's point of view of a culture's pulpy genre cinema, and two whether it's based on actual mythology or whether it was merely made up or exaggerated for the target audience indulging of exploitation horror films; in either case particularly with trying to comprehend another film like The Boxer's Omen (1983), which is notoriously bizarre, just accepting the more eyebrow raising moments of Black Magic matter-of-factly actually adds to the appeal of them. Particularly in my case, having found I hate most British horror films from this era, and bored with a lot of modern mainstream horror movies, something like this for all its flaws is so much more compelling because of this type of content that you never witness in English language horror movies barring the more underground ones and how it's attempts at depicting this supernatural content through the means they had give them their own distinct aesthetic.

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It's helps as well, in spite of the bland lead and his similarly bland love interest trying to claim him back as the figures the audience was meant to follow, it's still a Shaw Brothers film with their usual production value. It does emphasis more on-location exterior scenes rather than the built sets of their period films, which does give it a surprisingly gritty tone than to their usual work, but the fantastical sense of the artificial is still found from their films in the ways it tries to be creepy or just gross. This earthly sense of transformation and horror makes up for any issues with the plot because it taps into what horror as a genre should be, weird and utterly about the material in all its viscous form, and thankfully the plot's as melodramatic and surreally matter-of-fact about the events taking place as one would hope for, the fact that it comes from a region (Asia) where spirituality and mysticism are still held with great respect having a sincerity to the proceedings even if this is the pulp, deliberately gonzo take on witchcraft than a proper documentary. That and the best thing about Black Magic and the factor which punched me in the gut, the utterly unpredictable and incredible score by in-house Shaw Brothers composer Yung-Yu Chen. As erratic as it is eclectic, it's one of the most diverse and frantic scores I've come across in a long while; against a film as frantic as it, it seamlessly lunges from exotic lounge to psychedelic rock guitar, to literal electronic noise to what sounds like ambient whale song, every part of which especially through headphones compelling by itself. This type of production value puts a film like Black Magic films from various countries like Mystics of Bali (1981) because, rather than large passages of padding and less than stellar production value, Black Magic manages to both be compelling weird at times but have the technical quality that people praise Shaw Brothers for.

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Blood Rage (1987)

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Director: John Grissmer

Screenplay: Bruce Rubin

Cast: Louise Lasser (as Maddy); Mark Soper (as Todd/Terry); Julie Gordon (as Karen); Jayne Bentzen (as Julie); Marianne Kanter (as Dr. Berman)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #72

Blood Rage is an exceptionally dull slasher. At this point it's a crapshoot which actually stand out of interest for me, but like in a lot of cases the initial premise is interest. Despite the fact that it doesn't try in the slightest as an eighties film to do an accurate depiction of the seventies in the prologue, it starts well enough with a single mother (Louise Lasser) in the car with her boyfriend and her twin sons Todd and Terry (both played by Mark Soper) at a drive-in theatre. One son, as the twin trope in horror films usually are, is evil killing a random patron in another car and incriminating the brother. Years later, the evil son is living with their mother about to celebrate Thanksgiving only for the innocent brother to have broken out of the mental institution he's been locked in and for a body count to begin.

And soon after that prologue the film suddenly changes pace to a crawl. Uninteresting characters cannot help as, when news of his brother escaping out into the public is known, the evil one decides to carve up the friends he's pretended to like in a random moment where his sociopathic tendencies weren't kept hidden, proceeding to grab a random set of various weapons and go on a spree with little dramatic tension. This means many bog standard moments of the killer cutting through people one-by-one whilst frequently making the same comment over and over that blood isn't like cranberry sauce, even going as far as lick the blood to prove this theory.

Baring how this is probably what the eighties was probably like for most people, large hair but with warm wooden panel decor for homes rather than pastel and neon colours, it's only really the gore that stands out in the stalk and slash scenes. It's certainly memorable from special effects artist Ed French - severed hand clutching a beer can, someone being bisected from the waist sidewards - but it's no longer appealing by itself after seeing so many gore horror movies, to the point the desensitisation is from the point that merely having it isn't enough of interest, the same you can say for the brief moments of nudity as without anything else to bolster it, it's an empty thrill with little else. In terms of Thanksgiving slasher films, the more shambolic Home Sweet Home (1981) with its giggling, PCP addicted hulk killer and an annoying pest with a backpack guitar amp wearing mime makeup is far more compelling than a young girl wandering around in the dark looking for her lost cat or a good twin who looks literally damp as well as figuratively when he appears.

The only exception within the film that stands out is Lasser. Her performance cannot salvage Blood Rage in the slightest, but she's compelling in her own scenes, a character visibly affected mentally by all that's happened and lives in her own world. Some of the performance may come off as unintentionally funny, vacuuming while drinking from a bottle of wine, or chewing the scenery, calling random telephone operators trying to find her boyfriend's line as she becomes more and more histrionic, but that flamboyant and almost ridiculous portrayal is still the sole emotional connection you attach to the film. Her denial of which of her sons is the guilty one, alongside the bleak ending for her character, does redeem the film even if the rest of Blood Rage is not that interesting.

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Formula for a Murder (1985)

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aka. 7, Hyden Park: la casa maledetta

Director: Alberto De Martino

Screenplay: Alberto De Martino and Vincenzo Mannino

Cast: Christina Nagy (as Joanna); David Warbeck (as Craig); Carroll Blumenberg (as Ruth); Rossano Brazzi (as Dr. Sernich); Andrea Bosic (as Father Peter); Loris Loddi (as Father Davis)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #71

Alberto De Martino is infamously known for The Pumaman (1980), a particularly infamous attempt to latch onto the Superman film boom with Donald Pleasance trying his best as the villain and some of the most cumbersome flying sequences ever to grace a film. Other films show however De Martino was better than that film, and from the beginning Formula for a Murder is a lot more interesting. The only issue is that, like the other films of his I've seen, I can't particularly shout praises to Formula for a Murder either as it's not that spectacular.

A psycho thriller whose plot can be found in multiple languages in many films, a wealthy paraplegic woman Joanna (Christina Nagy) marries her sports coach Craig (David Warbeck) only for an issue related to her childhood to be a potential threat to her. A childhood trauma of being raped by a man posing as a priest not only lead to her physical disability but a heart condition that could kill her if the painful memories of the incident were ever to be evoked, which someone is attempted to capitalise on as she starts to see a faceless priest figure carrying a bloodied doll enter places when no one else is there.

The result's a giallo potboiler that can find its routes in countless inheritance based murder stories and Gaslight (1940), whilst Joanne's best friend and assistance Ruth (Carroll Blumenberg) starts to act in a very suspicious way, or is at least jealous of her friend's marriage with Craig. Giallos' are very subjective in whether they count in the horror genre or not, murder mysteries first which were so prolific in a short period of time and with films being made still after that boom period that they bleed into multiple sub-genres, this one qualifiable in horror as it evokes a supernatural tone with Joanne's trauma and the level of gore, shown upfront in the opening scene when a man goes into a confessional booth at a Catholic Church with intentions of slitting the priest's throat. There's also the reoccurring dream which shows the extent of Joanne's trauma, a surreal one involving a rolling ball, a wheelchair that stops working properly and a priest seemingly pushing her along for no reason that stands as the more interesting moments in the whole film.

The real issue with Formula for a Murder is that it's too conventional as a giallo to stand out. Played too straight, it's a case of where giallo's tendency to go on a few gnawled tangents, even if the plot becomes difficult to grasp, would've done the story greater favour. The one virtue that does make the film worth seeing once, barring the aforementioned dream sequences, is just David Warbeck by himself. While dubbed with what doesn't sound like his voice at all, he's a figure who stands out just from having done these Italian genre films by a charisma that you can't help as a viewer but appreciate. While as much memorable witnessing the surreal horrors in Lucio Fulci's The Beyond (1981), it's as much how he's able to brush off the more sillier roles he's had in Italian genre cinema without issue, the yellow mack raincoat he has to eventually wear in this film not phasing him at all, especially as he chews the scenery in the last bloody act with gusto. As a film though, Formula for a Murder's definitely one of the least interesting giallos I've seen sadly.  

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Goodnight Mommy (2014)

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Directors: Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala

Screenplay: Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala

Cast: Susanne Wuest (as The Mother); Elias Schwarz (as Elias); Lukas Schwarz (as Lukas)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #70

(WARNING - CONTAINS SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS THROUGHOUT)

Sadly there's a lot of films in existence that build up a perfect rhythm for two-thirds of their lengthy only to collapse in the final thirty minutes due to various ill-advised creative decisions - call it "third act madness", a M. Night Shyamalan plot twist, anything that ruins a film that could've done gangbusters is the entire film had kept with its initial good form. Goodnight Mommy is one such film, which is disappointing knowing it's a rare horror film, with art house leanings, directed by two women, as I hope more women direct genre films rather than dramas, and that it's produced by Ulrich Seidl, a controversial but incredible director of films like Import/Export (2007) who was clearly attracted to Goodnight Mommy for it's cold tone and how it deconstructs the image of perfect middle class life in its first half like in many of his own work.

For two-thirds it's perfect. Twin brothers Elias and Lukas (real twins Elias and Lukas Schwarz) await their mother (Susanne Wuest) to return home from hospital, only for her face to be entirely bandaged and her personality to be emotionally distant and with strange changes in behaviour. The two boys become suspicious whether she's their mother or not; you first believe this to be the case but eventually, for me, it becomes a disturbing take on childhood imagination and of how a child views the world being inherently toxic. Even if it wasn't explicitly about Capgras syndrome, viewing another close to you as an imposter due to mental health issues, it could work still in the context of how an entire emotional sub current adults have, their mother having been in an accident and divorcing, brings out a part of her behaviour that they could not understand, causing them to view her as an evil stand-in to their mother rather than view her their mother going through literal physical transformation as well as emotional change.

The result is like a razor being scrapped on your neck in how much tension there is in every scene, the stereotypical mode of how scenes are shot in modern art house films, slow and glacial, having an immensely virtuous effect in adding to this dread here. The almost sterile nature of the home the film is set in, dramatically contrasted with the natural woodland outside, gives the greater sense of this being an undermining of the image of familial bliss and leads to the strange and bewildering combinations of the exterior and interior, nature against modern urban like, like the boys' obsession with keeping countless cockroaches as pets or a nightmare of their mother stripping off in the woodland at like a witch or a feral entity.

It manages to become stomach churning in terms of denying the notion of childhood innocence, turning the ideas of fairytales of children being right when against the evil step mother etc. entirely on its head, family relationship made into a web of uncertainty not helped by the mother's distance and behaviour caused by great emotional stress. When it's purposely playing with what the truth is, unsure whether she's a victim of the boys' bizarre behaviour or whether she's an actual imposter, that vague but troubling tone for the film is absolutely compelling. The combination of art house with streaks of horror also includes moments which reach into the stranger areas of the genre, such as the sons placing a cockroach on their mother as she sleeps and a dead cat eventually being preserved in a fish tank full of flammable liquid.

Then the third act takes place and the good will to Goodnight Mommy starts to dwindle. The plot twist of one of the sons being dead, and being imagined all this time by the surviving one, a la The Other (1972) in how the imagined one corrupts the still living brother, is absolutely galling when its revealed, set up in the beginning but still a cheap twist especially as the initial set up with its creepy sterile tone is so much more compelling in comparison. The third act also becomes more clichéd, not only in the mother being tied to the bed upstairs and shouting for help to visitors downstairs at one point, only interesting in a darkly humorous way in that it's two elderly Red Cross members very pushy about donations involved, the moment it does briefly turn into a Ulrich Seidl film, but that it becomes a prolonged series of torture sequences with one of the boys being coxed by his mother to let her free. This in itself it somewhat problematic, as it's a hybrid of Hostel (2005) to the type of extreme art cinema of now which doesn't try to dissect this type of image at the same time, but that it's also when the film suddenly turns into a slog, the final plot twist a final death blow to its virtues. The weird mix of unnerving tension, reminiscent of producer Seidl's own films, and grotesque flights of horror is ebbed away for generic modern ultra violence and bad plot twists, quashing the goodwill the first half Goodnight Mommy had built up. 

From http://static.rogerebert.com/uploads/review/primary_
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Fear X (2003)

From https://st.kp.yandex.net/im/poster/
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Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Screenplay: Hubert Selby Jr. and Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast: John Turturro (as Harry); Deborah Kara Unger (as Kate); Stephen McIntyre (as Phil); William Allen Young (as Agent Lawrence); Gene Davis (as Ed)

Synopsis: Harry (John Turturro), a mall security guard, becomes obsessed with deliberate but mysterious murder of his wife, only for a growing series of clues and a constant stream of hallucinations to push him towards finding the culprit himself and finding out why his wife died.

Here, all the way back in 2003, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn was already making idiosyncratic films that massively divided viewers. The Neon Demon (2016) may be exceptionally polarising now, but the result of how Fear X did before he had his reputation, his first attempt to break into the US, led his production company to bankruptcy and Refn to have to heal his wounds until the end of the late 2000s, making acclaimed sequels to his debut Pusher (1996),  and making a special in the Miss Marple franchise in 2009, the least excepted part of his filmography, before Bronson (2008) and Valhalla Rising (2009) brought him up to the present day auteur who's both loved and hated. Whilst Only God Forgives (2013) was notorious for him, he still got to make The Neon Demon three years after, whilst Fear X was an entirely different kettle of fish without the reputation of a mainstream smash in Drive (2011) to soften the divided critical opinion.

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Fear X is a very distinct animal that presents what would happen with Refn's later films, a through line to be found but within a work entrenched in a gritty, naturalistic grunginess for most of its length at odds with his later stylised, neon soaked movies. It still follows an almost elliptical tone that remains constant in his career however, which is the most distinct point to take from it. Turturro is prominent in three quarters or even more of the film, slowly unfolding scenes following his building up of clues of who is responsible for his wife's death through a minimalistic take on a very conventional crime narrative. The film starts to become more allusive as it goes on, becoming more like the Refn films of the later 2010s when momentum builds around the protagonist's hallucinations and the cause of the story being merely explained in snippets and hints in the dialogue only.

From http://cineplex.media.baselineresearch.com/
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The most pronounced aspect of Fear X eventually, when its plot is a straight out crime thriller on paper, is the subconscious flashes of Turturro's mind straight from horror cinema. It could be seen as jarring - red and black visages of faces pushing through membrane¹, flashes of x-ray like shapes layering on top of each other and, probably the most alarming moment in any of Refn's cinema despite all the gore he's depicted, an elevator in an entirely dark room whose light shows the ground being submerged in a foot at least of red water - but it matches an easy to forget the subplot suggesting the weight of the protagonist's grief is slowly evolving into this after it stars with his wife appearing at times to comfort him either as a memory or a ghost, the more nightmarish imagery building from the violence he has witnessed and will eventually find himself in trying to complete his goal. That the figure behind the murder is not an inherently evil figure, but given snippets of an ordinary home life thus forcing the viewer in a moral conundrum, brings a horrible sense of the viewer knowing how badly the story will resolve, the screws being turned more tightly to their discomfort as Turturro eventually finds himself in a red lit hotel straight from a David Lynch film. That the film even in its end credits, a split of various CCTV camera screens, is purposely undercutting the viewer's expectations of what they'd presume would happen in the film forces a cold, unnerving mood to be felt throughout its short running time.

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Technical Detail:

Filmed in a gritty tone for a large part, Fear X has a remarkably different tone from the likes of Drive and later Refn films, feeling closer to the American indie films yore with Turturro's appearance and the wintery small town setting of the first half. Certainly this film brings up the fact Refn is able to take direct influences from many other films but creates his own idiosyncratic style, able to hopscotch between a grounded drama in scenes of Turturro as a security guard in a mall chasing an older man who's shop lifted, to a mix of horror and the montage effect of Stan Brakhage shorts in the more nightmarish imagery. The drastic changes in tone when it becomes more heighted doesn't contradict the more natural, paranoid tone of the first half in the slightest, able to make the two halves whole in how the slow methodical pace used through the film keeps everything controlled and suitable to each other.

The music marks Refn's constant obsession with electronic music, with the legendary Brian Eno with J. Peter Schwalm contributing an unnerving droning score of sounds and noises between them that adds to the sense of paranoia throughout the story.

From http://cineplex.media.baselineresearch.com
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Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist/Grotesque/Mindbender

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

There're numerous films in Refn's filmography which exist within a subjective, sometimes nightmarish, reality which can exist out of time at points. Fear X at first is a grounded, subdued drama but like the later films a lingering sense of dread is felt at the start and, amplified by Eno and Schwalm's unsettling score, grows in intensity constantly next to Turturro's incredibly subtle performance, Refn's tendency for prolonged and lingering scenes having a distorting affect on viewers. Interestingly without the violence of the later films, very minimal throughout, the subjective nature of how its treated becomes even more disturbing in terms of the more fantastical imagery used or the scenes involving CCTV footage which have their own alien, grimy realism. As much a psychodrama drama as a crime mystery, the film entirely removes the expectations of a revenge story in its matter-of-fact anti-climax, turning against the viewer in a way that for me wasn't disappointing but gave me a chill on the back of my neck.

Personal Opinion:

An incredibly underrated film in Nicolas Winding Refn's career and actually my favourite from all the ones I've seen. For all the criticism of the later films being style over substance and for their graphic violence, Fear X qualifies as a significant rebuttal in how it takes a conventional plot and turns it into a subtle, potent experience.

From http://offscreen.com/images/FearXendhighway.jpg

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¹ This is actually reminiscent to the music video for Here to Stay by nu metal band Korn from around this period, only far more subtly creepy.

Invasion Earth: The Aliens are Here (1988)

From http://pics.filmaffinity.com/Invasion_Earth_
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Director: Robert Skotak

Screenplay: Miller Drake

Cast: Janice Fabian (as Joanie); Christian Lee (as Billy); Larry Bagby (as Tim); Dana Young (as Mike); David Dunham (as Charlie); Charles Wycoff (as Willie)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #69

At a cinema in middle USA, insectoid aliens led by the father of the green pigs from the Angry Birds videogames take over the management and intend to use the patrons as the first building blocks of a full scale invasion, using the vast array of fifties and sixties sci-film reels in the projection booth to numb the patrons' mind so they can use their technology to harness the human psyche. Only a white bread young couple can stop them, whilst most of the running time is the film raiding the vast catalogue of pre-existing films from decades before, from the terror of The Mole People (1956) to even big studio works like the 1953 War of the Worlds, in compilation film form. The story itself is merely perfunctory. A comedy in spirit, its mainly broad caricatures the film occasionally cuts to between film clips acting in exaggerated ways whilst the aliens take them over one by one - of two chubby hillbillies who don't change drastically even after Body Snatcher pods have turned them radioactive glowing green, a pair of the type of punk rocker that only existed in these types of genre movies for some inexplicable reason, a white trash family whose daughter is so loud someone in the audience knocks her out with a thrown wrench, two Japanese men who have cameras - broad but inoffensive stereotypes who are merely mild in terms of the humour.

The sci-fi narrative is a pastiche of said films, the leads bland white suburbanites whilst the aliens, well done in terms of a low budget film, have more charisma in spite of the lack of moving mouths, a pig-like blob which grunts managing to have more comic timing than the human cast. (One of his henchmen even gets to make out with a human woman who stars off nerdy before, in another broad stereotype, takes off her glasses and undoes her hair revealing herself to be a hot blonde). It does the pastiche with some charm, even managing to pull off a giant prosthetic monster at the end for an exclamation mark, but it's merely okay as a stand-by film, one that stands oddly with its subject as its both a tribute to this type of sci-fi cinema but constantly has characters mentioning these films as mind numbing and using them as a soma for the humans they're trying to control. It's an interesting meta-textual commentary, even by accident, about the aliens taking over the human race with films which warn people against such invasions, but its ambiguous in terms of whether it's meant to pay affection to these films or glibly taking advantage of them to make a new movie.

From http://livedoor.blogimg.jp/thejunkmovie/imgs/0/5/0507f3c6.jpg

The real interest is all the films used in clip form. Films I want to see - even if many of them will probably suffer from their stilted writing, bland leads and accidental archness, the snippets of them in Invasion Earth, even if they emphasise said stiffness, would convince anyone they are utterly surreal and artistically eye-popping hallucinations even if they had pie dish flying saucers in them. Fresh faced Lee Van Cleef attacking a giant combination of a squid and dog chew toy with a blow torch, a rear-projection assisted giant man, countless family members of the monster at the end of Luigi Cozzi's Contamination (1980), disembodied brains and faces floating in ether, and an entire deeply troubled psyche of destruction and humanity being controlled for unknown forces. Buildings being graphically destroyed by giant monsters, people being taken over or, in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), replaced by copies, and a surprising amount of aliens wanting to take Earth women for sexual favours or (explicably in one of the trailers used) breeding stock for Martians, suggesting some deeply disturbing subtext from the creators depending on what the aliens are meant to represent, or a type of exceptionally kinky sexual fetish spilling out, all of which especially when the film becomes a constant montage of various different clips bouncing off each other having a potent effect in seeing all the destruction and chaos all at once. If anything alongside the legitimately weird and freakish imagery involved - the stop motion tendril brains from Fiend Without a Face (1958) are actually disturbing in terms of body horror here especially when they shrivel up and die after being shot - the deep well of fears and public concerns filtered out into these apparently mainstream b-flicks make them compelling enough to search out alongside the classics also shown.

Altogether you can't call Invasion Earth good, the best praise possible to give it that it has the virtue of any compilation of enticing viewers to track down the films used within. The film as a piece of entertainment thought is a peculiar oddity from the late eighties that's inexplicable in why it would be made and, whether for the cinema or (likely) video, who the exact target was for it. With no gore or swearing, it's suitable for kids with its light sense of humour, but even then I have to scratch my head encountering this peculiar one-off, and not necessary a positive reaction. It's encouraged me to track down the clips used in it, which I have to commend it for, but I can't proclaim it a great cult flick with pays tribute to an older era of cinema, more so as Popcorn (1991) exists, a slasher film which goes out of its way with success as a tribute to this gimmick filled era of filmmaking, understandably more well known compared to Invasion Earth.

From http://www.horreur.net/sites/default/files/
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Tokyo x Erotica (2001)

From http://images.contactmusic.com/images/
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Director: Takahisa Zeze

Screenplay: Takahisa Zeze

Cast: Yumeka Sasaki (as Haruka); Yûji Ishikawa (as Kenjo)        

Synopsis: In past, present and future surrounding the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, a man Kenjo (Ishikawa) and a woman Haruka (Yumeka) exist both in life and even after their deaths at various different periods in three different time frames. A couple who break up, the man will die by being present at the gas attack at the wrong time and the women by Death himself in a pink bunny costume a few years later. Surrounding these events are masochistic sex with a gangster, a group of people celebrating in 1989 which leads to a sexual encounter between two women and Death, and the central couple reuniting as new people after their deaths in the 2000s confronting Death then, all interlinked by real documentary interviews with the public and the actors themselves musing on life and death.

Japanese pinku films are a fascinating genre in erotica. Whilst they can be merely softcore sex films, they can jump between genres, and because of the censorship that still exists in Japan which prohibits real sex being depicted without pixilation even in pornography, the genre has been allowed to thrive for decades. Also because of how its set up as an industry - as discussed in the vital tome on the subject Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema (2008) by Tom Mes - it's a hot bed for new talent who have become celebrated directors out of it (like Kiyoshi Kurosawa), and for politics and experimentation. With the boldest examples, as long as there were sex scenes and nudity, you could have openly political films, emotional dramas or absurd and inventive stories. Tokyo x Erotica admittedly, from one of the Four Devils of the 1990s pinku resurgence Takahisa Zeze, (who was joined by Kazuhiro Sano, Hisayasu Sato and Toshiki Sato as the other three), does feel like an ungainly creation, like a man sawn in half and attached to a different set of hips in being a softcore (but very explicit) sex film and being a dream-like drama about relationships and the notion of death. As Behind the Pink Curtain ends up emphasising with the later films up to the 2000s, a divide becomes evident between the growing audience for artistically bold pink films, who reaped them with praise and awards, and the patrons of an actual pinku film theatre, a fissure in this found in Tokyo x Erotica and somewhat frustrating as it is memorable as a result.

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It's a bold move to tackle the 1995 saris gas attack in an erotic film like this, certainly not the only Japanese work with erotic sub currents to tackle serious subject matter the polar opposite of sensuality on face value. Far from a well schooled expert on the incident, it's however a grim incident which still has art tackling the subject explicitly or metaphorically in this decade, one which needed to be tackled carefully so not to become insulting or trivialising. Zeze does not trivialise it or do anything that would seem problematic, as instead it's a background influence that plays part of the film being a time capsule of the decade before the Millennium, also referencing the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 in passing glance as part of this. It juggles this with moments of lightness and carnality which manage never to contradict each other in the end. In the midst of these references, Death is a literal figure, more than happy to have sex with men and women, even managing to convince two female friends into a  sweaty, sexually explicit and intense threesome, whilst offering platitudes to mortals to live before he if their maker. It's strange that he's sometimes in a pink bunny costume, changes actor, and once appears dressed as Superman in a public street killing someone with a toy water pistol, but it doesn't detract from how explicitly serious the themes are about mortality. The real interviews do undercut the pornographic atmosphere with some surprisingly poignant thoughts, a couple with child off the streets to the main actress expressing deep rumblings on the subject of the movie.

From http://www.kino.de/wp-content/gallery/tokyo-x-erotica-2001/
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If anything it's the main narrative of the central couple which feels weak if only because, having to juggle so much in only seventy seven minutes, the film is stuck in a nebulous place without fully embracing its clear desire to be a more unconventional, strange film and a serious statement on real life, more difficult to organise because of its lengthy sex scenes in-between the drama. The sex itself is surprisingly transgressive, a tension in them that's a virtue to the film, both in the flippant reversals of convention like Death preferring a woman's finger in his rectum rather than the other way around, or how a passionate sex scene between a gangster and his moll, before their interactions in their scenes turn sour and violent, is a S&M power play where he will tie her up, having sex with her by an open window overlooking what looks like a school field during an event, but he will gladly bark like a dog for her and have a water pistol full of semen shot into his face without complaint. It's instead the dramatic plot, having to also move back-and-forth between time, that's weaker in its attempts to be openly profound when instead, rather than trying to overreach in intellectual depth, this physical sexuality could've easily carried its themes more subtly.

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Technical Detail:

The version viewed for this review of Tokyo x Erotica had a blurry haze to the colours and burnt-on subtitles that made the film even more dreamlike, but Tokyo x Erotica is visibly a low budget film, made with an advantage of its down-to-earth and raw aesthetic as a result of being shot on the streets, somewhat successful in its gamble to switch between time periods because of how nondescript the environments and clothing of the actors is. Zeze's clear interest in letting scenes play out as long as possible for drama, even in as short of a film like this is, is also applaudable, allowing a lot of interest in the characters as a result.

Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist

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

While the fluctuation in chronology is important for the film's story, and the ending breaks from reality completely as the central couple reverses their fate, most of Tokyo x Erotica is an erotic drama with a slow, methodical pace that never really develops into a more unconventional film but merely one with some experimentation. Baring the odd props - the bunny suit, a yellow water pistol full of semen a woman fires at her lover's face and then into herself, the Superman costume - this is very much a sober, straight forward drama about death with a few moments of deliberate avant-garde tendencies.

Personal Opinion:

A fascinating work, evidence of pinku cinema's experimental tendencies but I confess my first Takahisa Zeze film is an uneven experience  in terms of having to negate being both softcore porn and having greater depth. A part of me suspects there might be more rewarding films from the Four Devils era of pinku films but Tokyo x Erotica is slightly underwhelming.

From http://www.asianfeast.org/wp-content/gallery/
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