The Soultangler (1987)

 

Director: Pat Bishow

Screenplay: John Bishow, Lance Laurie

Cast: Pierre Devaux as Dr. Anton Lupesky; Jane Kinser as Kim Castle; Tom Ciorciari as Zack

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #163

 

At least eat before you smoke!

Let me make a confession - I have never been a huge fan of Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator (1985), at least growing up and even into my thirties. Never for any specific reason, but hung by its own petard, its acclaim in the horror canon leaving an albatross to be hung round its neck with too much praise to live up to. Personally, I have preferred the first sequel Bride of the Re-Animator (1989), where Brian Yuzna and a team of crazed special effect artists in tow managed to both have an eerie premise, the creation of the perfect woman and all the issues related to this idea, and insanely imaginative and gore effects that leads the film to get bizarre by its finale. The one thing I am grateful for, mind, is also how this premise has managed to lead to a lot of rip-offs, cash-ins and even micro budget productions, all with the amusement that the original H.P. Lovecraft tale that lead to this, Herbert West - Reanimator, is a story Lovecraft was not fond of, because he had to work in a serialisation style, and some scholars of the author do not hold highly in his catalogue, which is strange to consider due to how evocative it still is.

I would be curious how Lovecraft would have reacted to the likes of the bizarre shot-on-video oddity Reanimator Academy (1992), where alongside the resurrected head of a stand up comedian you had gangsters from a cartoon bumbling through a tale of a reanimating agent. Another is The Soultangler, shot in Long Island in New York, befitting as, whilst an entirely different state, Lovecraft himself was born as hair's breath away in Rhode Island, able to be reached by boat in fact with ease The Soultangler mind, set in a time with a lot of eighties hair on the female cast and so much smoking that was cut out of the sixty two minute "director's cut", completely drifts off into its own tangent.

No budget cinema needs to be approached differently, as for every film which becomes an acclaimed breakout, even a legitimate masterpiece according to mainstream culture, many from the micro budgeted realm (even those with their own cult followings) are usually curiosities which require their own logic to fully appreciate. I have said this in so many words many times before, but it should always be returned to as that in itself is where my pleasure laid in the end. Slow, long dialogue and exposition scenes, homemade synth scores, and drastic reinterpretations of genre filmmaking are among such tropes between them, in this case a crazed scientist named Anton Lupesky who has figured out how to let his soul leave his body and enter any other, even long dead or just the brain, as long as there are eyes within the remnants. All at the cost of being an insane butcher of the living, getting his two lackeys to kidnap young women for his perversions so he can experiment on and tangle his soul into theirs.  

From there The Soultangler is a languid experience, a slow drift along in the full ninety minute cut, following also a female reporter whose father was one of Lupesky's early victims and goes on a journalist investigation of him. Probably one of the biggest distinctions about no budget cinema is that shooting with one's environments, a surprising amount of verisimilitude collides with the chaos of a genre plot line. Large sketches of The Soultangler is dialogue with the distinct haze of its filmed form effecting all, a world where acting is in a coarse, sometimes shouted and sometimes hazy form, it having a naivety, with the exception of the cops at the end of the film who have to clear up the eventual bloodbath, none of which is stereotypically "wooden".

Long Island here actually looks nice - for every grubby environment, there are many trees even in the streets and a sense of a humble community, perfect for this type of locally sourced homemade film making. It is arguably, for any accusation you can say over a Hollywood horror film being more professionally made, actually superior in its real locations, from shooting in an airport to the reality of the New York environment, where a red Dodge kidnapping van haunts the suburbia and everyone is wearing jeans. Like in a serious drama, our lead Kim is in the struggle of being a journalist wanting to write good work for her paper The Daily Chronicle, only for her boss wanting to sell copies by leaving it a rag. A lot of stark, almost abandoned environments and buildings make up a lot of the eeriness of the environment, and even the one scene in the villain's home involves a nice setting, a wooden panelled home the production was lucky to get permission to film in. One which is appropriate as a contrast to the grubby basement where his horrible experiments on, where he just experiments on victims and leaves body parts hanging around because he is one jam sandwich short of a picnic. Not surprising from a man, alongside being an elitist and a misogynist, who thinks telling a woman her gender secrete a wonderful essence is a great pick up line.

The result is definitely an acquired taste even next to more well known no budget films, but that in itself lulls you into a false sense of security. When the heroine has her drink spiked, we are abruptly thrown into a nightmare sequence with a talking doll that, when crushed under foot, spills out butcher's offal, followed by zombies who could be the denizens of Carnival of Souls (1962) terrorising her. A film where, falling asleep, a person suddenly wakes up peeling her own arm off. It is moments like this you can use as a perfect example of this type of cinema's unpredictability. That, for all the lengthy scenes of shouted irritance and smoking, or the rock song played over scenes of the villain just being mad, you enter weird tangents like this that keep you on your toes. In fact, baring that song which just has the title of the film and moans over and over, or a rockabilly like punk song, the synth score itself can vary between dungeon synth and an Italian horror film score, which alongside the post dubbing and that the film was preserved on hazy 1'' master tapes, makes it a lot more atmospheric that it initially suggests.

In fact, out of the no budget or micro budget realm, The Soultangler is one of the more interesting as, whilst it is still cheese, it is a film with a bit more production value or just the luck to shot in a place where they had some personality to work with, rather than go isolate themselves in a couple of dull greyish corridors. It even uses Haxan (1922), Benjamin Christensen's seminal and unique horror-documentary hybrid on witchcraft, as a placeholder for a documentary about devil worship in the United States, taking advantage of it being in the public domain and good nightmarish imagery of witches kissing Satan's behind whilst it was available.

Of course, the ending gets ridiculous as a micro budgeted version of the ending of Re-Animator. Moving brains, head chopping, arguably a complete lack of logic from the villain of just jumping into bodies only to let them be willingly be disposed of, and absolutely absurd material made by devoted practical effects artists and with the cast eventually covered in fake blood. Within a film that manages to literally run with the premise of the eyes being the windows to the soul, or that someone in the script writing had bothered to read books, as this film both a) references glucose helping to improve memory and b) mentions French philosopher René Descartes' obsession with the human pineal gland being where the soul was location, I have to admire this somewhat silly film for having a lot more personality. In his career, Pat Bishow did make a few more films but not many over the decades. This film, released by the American Genre Film Archive on physical media and by Bleeding Skull beforehand, is the kind for the reason I have talked of which has led me to be charmed by these micro budgeted films regardless of their limitations. It is definitely entertaining if anything.  Having seen it multiple times now, all as much to write this review but ultimately out of a joy for the production, it a better film over other micro budget movies which have been torture to try to sit through for their lack of imagination in contrast.