The Sadist with Red Teeth (1970)

 

Director: Jean Louis Van Belle

Cast: Daniel Moosmann as Daniel; Jane Clayton as Jane; Albert Simono as Le docteur

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

 

That fang-boy won't get you promoted.

Thanks to the likes of the DVD label Mondo Macabro, you will find yourself encountering a film which you would never see before, in this case the work of director Jean Louis Van Belle. Alongside being a director of "scopitones"¹, early precursors to music videos, Van Belle has also been a gagman for a newspaper cartoonist, shepherd, farmhand, polytechnic graduate, events organiser, electrician...someone who worked for three days on Jacques Tati's legendary film Playtime (1967), and had led an impromptu anarchist band who took on the CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, the general reserve of the French National Police) during the May 1968 riots². Suffice to say, an obscure name in French genre cinema, Van Belle has led more in his life than most of us viewers have, and his eclectic life does explain how over the top and jokey The Sadist with Red Teeth is.

After a tragic car crash where he lost his best friend, a comic book artist named Daniel (Daniel Moosmann) has suffered from mental trauma where he is under the belief he is a vampire. His doctor, breaking the Hippocratic Oath, desires to push his psychosis to the point he becomes an actual blood drinker of the night. All it takes is a push, some hypnosis, some "medicine" that is so blue it evokes the dental disclosure tablets you could get in British for tooth care, and him finding novelty vampire teeth in a joke shop, and The Sadist with Red Teeth is as eccentric as it sounds. They are vastly different films in tone and plotting, but this is a Gaelic Vampire’s Kiss (1988), only instead of Nicolas Cage as a yuppie going mad. Both films are about men being turned into a vampire, both films however dealing with mental health of men and how both do involve novelty store vampire teeth being the catalyst for the turn. The film is quick to undercut its narrative with various forms of experimentation that goes on in-between the campy narrative of a man turning into a vampire: opening credits, featuring scenes from later in the film, done in negative; spiders superimposed in blood red over pieces of black card placed on the main actor's eyes or in his mouth in non-plot related sequences; and the great set piece involving reversed footage of people in the street (and cars) travelling reverse as our lead Daniel walks forward. Most curious of all is the use of stock black-and-white footage of a tornado hitting a town, of buildings being demolished and other footage to represent the protagonist's detachment from reality; it evokes the improvised feel of Bruce Conner's A Movie (1958), of putting various types of stock footage together, than for a conventional symbolic touch.

The film is incredibly delirious, not taking itself seriously at all. Actors suddenly appear with faces painted in various colours in a scene set in a butcher's shop, Daniel feeling the first tinges of something very wrong when purple faced women are there as he is trying to buy fresh mince there. Alarm bells should be going off, more than they do, when grabs a female patron's throat in a cinema, but the film's general tone is eccentric. There is a comparison between cops and chickens as Daniel with his girlfriend Jane (Jane Clayton), the one force attempting to keep him sane, encounters the later and asks for handcuffs when he buys one. The content is general is exaggerated. As the doctor (Albert Simono), continually check up on his patient and help him on his way to vampirism, his assistant with continuous facial tics played by Michel Maïofiss, who would become an acclaimed photographer, the farcical tone the movie takes is to the point even when people are dying of neck trauma, a playful game of viewing the film rather than taking the narrative too seriously is transpiring.

The film's bright sixties aesthetic against the grey, urban streets, in the cusp of one decade with its own cinema into the next, emphasises this. It becomes obvious that, in material with him talking about his career, included in the out-of-print Mondo Macabro DVD release of The Sadist With Red Teeth, that director Jean Louis Van Belle is a very self deprecating man who likes to undercut perceptions, so it makes natural sense that there is a jokey, self humoured tone to the film even if it is still played "straight" without any irony. The vampirism is depicted as ludicrous when the protagonist is pushed towards becoming an actual vampire, eventually leading to a rampage at a costume party where everyone - the police, his girlfriend, the doctor and his assistant, and a loud mouthed former lion tamer planning to claim a reward for the vampire's capture - give chase after him like a Benny Hill sketch with the fast forwarding or silly music. The only serious vampirism until the exact end is the protagonist's "transformation", meeting an older man who will bite his neck and turn him. It is serious because the older man is from the director's 1969 mondo documentary Forbidden Paris, dubbed the last vampire who is seen getting his freshly prepared blood from a slaughter house, the reality leading to this fictional tale and, admirably, nodding back in respect to the real man in a moment. It is too playing as stranger as a casting choice: strange as this is a rare vampire movie where you have a character pay to be bitten and become a vampire in a back street of France, and far stranger when it involves a subject from a director’s previous Mondo documentary. As for the protagonist, it only when the film ends on a supernatural note that his vampirism is taken seriously, the rest not mocking the idea but depicting its story as a lark. One that skirts Euro horror tropes - like a nude photo shot with two women involving hallucinations of paint red blood over bared torsos - but always inserts a winking nod to its absurdity.

If one was to remove Jean Louis Van Belle's playful tone and the experimentation, then the result would not be The Sadist With Red Teeth. It is a film that is quirky, not in a lame and jokey way, but one that likes having fun with its material, playing with the format. Neither is this explicitly in an intellectual dissertation, instead having a jest in its story, as it pushes it to the side in favour of moments for the sake of the images being created. Certainly when you look at Van Belle’s filmography in the descriptions – a cavalcade of genres and French actors over his career – you are grateful for at least one of his films having been salvaged and found by Mondo Macabro.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Psychotronic

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

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1) The Scopitone, by Cinémathèque française for Google Arts & Culture. By itself, this device is a fascinating discovery to look into: coin slot operated machines, like jukeboxes, which projected a variety of music videos (shown in film, by their end in laser disc) on a screen attached to the machine. It is the kind of tangent not likely to be known about and apt to be referenced to in regards to a director of them, one also as idiosyncratic by himself to learn of.

2) All documented on the Mondo Macabro DVD release in a text essay.