Ghoulies & Ghoulies II (1984 & 1987)

Director(s): Luca Bercovici (Ghoulies)

Screenplays: Luca Bercovici and Jefery Levy (Ghoulies) / Charlie Dolan and Dennis Paoli (Ghoulies II)

Cast:

Ghoulies: Peter Liapis as Jonathan Graves, Lisa Pelikan as Rebecca, Scott Thomson as Mike, Ralph Seymour as Mark "Toad Boy", Mariska Hargitay as Donna, Keith Joe Dick as Dick, David Dayan as Eddie, Victoria Catlin as Anastasia, Charene Cathleen as Robin, Tamara De Treaux as Greedigut, Peter Risch as Grizzel, Michael Des Barres as Malcolm Graves, Jack Nance as Wolfgang

Ghoulies II: Damon Martin as Larry, Royal Dano as Uncle Ned, Phil Fondacaro as Sir Nigel Penneyweight, J. Downing as P. Hardin, Kerry Remsen as Nicole, Dale Wyatt as Dixie, Jon Pennell as Bobby, Sasha Jenson as Teddy, Starr Andreeff as Alice, William Butler as Merle, Donnie Jeffcoat as Eddie, Christopher Burton as Leo

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

I'm a magician you sons of bitches. You can't kill me!

I did not expect the Ghoulies franchise begins with a Satanic cult about to sacrifice a baby in the scene, but like so many horror franchises, they either deviate from their original premises in the later sequels, or in this case develop their selling point after time, What would become the titular centre point for these films took their jumping point from a script by co-writer/director Luca Bercovici, who would work on the first film, and afterwards leave with his work continued on with the other three films. It is not a surprise though that this is a Charles Band production, distributed by his Empire Pictures, from a man who has set forth many a franchise about tiny homicidal puppets.

The baby is thankfully saved, even if his mother takes his place, growing up to be Jonathan Graves (Peter Liapis), inheriting the family home where this tale originates from with Wolfgang, a cult member who helped rescue him, as his sole family and an excuse to get David Lynch alumni Jack Nance in a nicely appreciated cameo with some plot importance. Cue a party with slasher film archetypes, goofballs obsessed with strip poker in a home full of occult literature, making the bad decision to perform an occult ritual whilst drunk. Even sober, this is a dumb idea, as Jonathan becomes obsessed, possessed even, to develop him magic skills and becomes overcome with them. That and summoning the titular Ghoulies, starting with a hairy weasel goblin that stands up to one's knees, which are going to be there to terrorise people.

It is strange that I come into this series always presumed to have a more comedic edge, and I only admit only seeing Ghoulies IV (1994) growing up with a less than stellar reaction, so that was not a good perspective for all this time to ever have had. The first film undeniably is trying to be more serious, which just happened to involved involve homicidal critters played with puppets, who feel like an afterthought here and whose comedic aspects would be ran with further in later films. If you accept they are razor toothed and have a thing for eating faces, they are cuter than menacing, even if it's my sick view of cuteness inspired by having Monsters in My Pocket toys as a kid, and sadly maligned. They are, for a film made when Joe Dante's Gremlins (1984) exists, an arbitrary aspect to a plot more focused about a man being possessed by his satanic father from the grave, making this as a work that is indebted to the era's tropes in the Ghoulies' inclusion, to the point Gremlins' producers Warner Brothers sued this film for the similarities to Gremlins but lost¹. Despite this luck, the Ghoulies are never taken advantage of this selling point, and there was a sense for me, going through these films for the review, this was the least interesting of the ones so far. I will concede that this film had issues I have sympathy for, such as the fact the production ran out of budget midway through and required the filmmakers to find funding², and there are many aspects to how this film could have turned out which were rejected. One I admit might have made the film more my thing, that being Jeffrey Combs being in the cast, but this was also once meant to be a children's film, and was meant to be in 3D, so Ghoulies had a chaotic coarse to even get made I have to take into consideration¹.

There is certainly a whimsical charm to this, Charles Band produced films having a sense of love within themselves for their playfulness, film pulp for its own sake like lifting the clown puppet from Poltergeist (1982), or two dwarf actors playing mystic servants summoned by Jonathan, looking like cast members from a high fantasy film or from Knightmare, the 1980s British TV series which experimented with early green screen to send its contestants into said worlds. I will also say that Richard Band, Charles Band's brother, and Shirley Walker, a pioneer for being one of the first female film composers in Hollywood, also compose between them a score which feels like it is from a larger budget production and is great. Richard Band is an unsung hero for these genre films for his work, whilst Walker, with her work for DC Comic animated adaptations, like Batman: The Animated Series, to her work on the Final Destination series, would sadly pass in 2006.  Thankfully, in 2014 The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) created the Shirley Walker Award in 2014 to honour the diversity of film and television music, to emphasis her importance in the industry.

Brutally however, this is just not a film for me. I will not say it is bad, which defeats the purpose of a review by saying films are just not for me, but it is true here. I like the attitude behind this film, but it does drift off into a plot I had no interest in. One legitimate criticism I have, regardless of my awareness of the production issues, is those titular ghouls who do immediately stand out - the green demon baby ones to the weasel goblin, when not eating its way out the chicken on the dining table, being a pervert hiding under your bed during an attempted occult sex ritual - are not really a part of the material. This film clearly realised this mistake as these creatures eventually became the central focus in later films, whilst this particular film is an acquired taste for me personally. An early film in his career, his first directorial production, Luca Bercovici would continue on to the likes of Rockula (1990), which seems more appealing for me for being about a vampire wanting to have a career in rock music with Susan Tyrrell and musician Bo Diddley among the cast.

Ghoulies II is a considerably more focused and interesting film for me, opening with Anthony Dawson, of Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954), in a cameo as a priest running away from Satanists with Ghoulies in a cloth sack. His attempt to dispose of them for the sake of humanity in a barrel of waste, conveniently marked as "Extremely Toxic" and left open to mist in a garage, ends up with him in said barrel and melting into a skeleton. The Ghoulies escape, five of them, and hitch a ride with travellers for a carnival who stopped at the garage, one of which is Royal Dano, already having been Abraham Lincoln's voice at the Hall of Presidents attraction at Disney's Magic Kingdom beforehand in his career alongside cinema, playing an alcoholic ex-magician who runs a haunted house named Satan's Den.

There are many improvements for what is a silly tale, the first being that needed focus on the Ghoulies themselves, legitimately evil critters who enjoy causing pain and mischief, one even knowing how to use a switchblade, which becomes more threatening. They are stuck in Satan's Den, and from here, this is significantly more interesting as a sequel for me, with the added caveat that I have a bias for carnival set films anyway, making this more tantalising. Dano is running the attraction, with the help of his nephew Larry (Damon Martin), which is one of the rides in danger of being closed by an evil eighties yuppie, an accountant who has plants to axe the attractions going in the red, Satan's Den likely to be replaced by ladies' mud wrestling by the end of the week only for the Ghoulies to accidentally bring more customers into the attraction that night. A worthy mention too, as he is a great inclusion, is Phil Fondacaro; whilst some of the lines in regards to him being an actor with dwarfism have not aged well, his character is awesome, a former Shakespearian actor and friend to Larry named Sir Nigel, a carnival employee who gets into the thick of the plot too.

It is perverse to think Satan's Den is not doing well but is far more elaborate than most real haunted houses I have been to, one I wish to go to, as this is a heightened movie version of the carnival with the production team (and real ride operators) deserving praise for this exaggerated setting. The film was fun to just watch for its production design in context of a goofy late eighties horror movie, in terms that everything is like the place of one's dreams, Satan's Den itself a vast building with elaborate practical attractions, like pop-up mummies, that emphasis the joy of the real ones you walk past in ordinary life if they had the production values of a small genre film, to the art design through the carnival like for the entrance of the "Arabian" exotic dancers. The score by Fuzzbee Morse, the awesomely named composer whose credits for musicians he has worked on is actually too long to pick from but least includes Frank Zappa to actor Harry Dean Stanton, is awesome to and adds to this with pure horror synth, and as much of the enjoyment comes from showing so many clichés of the era but in an enjoyable way. The ladies' mud wrestling reference is one of these, and it is to the point a child randomly has a shuriken throwing star on him, in the era of the ninja craze, to throw at rat creatures who puke green goo on them, because naturally kids have shuriken stars on them. They even went as far, for the metal head character who has to take his "tunes" with a boom box into the haunted house, the production got then notorious band W.A.S.P. to record a song exclusively for the production; before lead singer Blackie Lawless moved to more serious lyrics in the late eighties to early nineties albums, and then returned to his Christian faith, they were controversial for Tipper Gore angering songs like Animal (Fuck like a Beast) and him having a buzz saw codpiece, a perfect band for this era of heavy metal interlinking with heavy metal before the more serious and critically acclaimed albums took over for W.A.S.P. onwards.

Eventually bringing in a bigger-than-human size costume for the final, it has no pretence, already playing to humour further than the prequel even if with a sick streak, as the chaos in the carnival that ends this film evoking the influence of Gremlins, varying between overt slapstick pratfalls to a critter causing a ride cart to fly off and kill at least two people glibly. Also there is a fixation on toilets, the series trope from the prequel that followed from this, as the Ghoulie in a toilet moment from before is escalated in a painful way. Its director Albert Band, father of Charles Band, was clearly a safe pair of hands for this production, late into a career mostly as a producer but making films like I Bury the Living (1958) in the fifties, so the sense the film was able to be as entertaining and fun as it was comes with the sense of someone, as a producer for most of his career at this point, who thankfully knew what to shot to win the punters over. The next film, which took four years to appear, took this series further into comedy to the point it may put people off, whilst here, the balance between the humour and playful horror tone is perfect. After the sense that the first Ghoulies did not stand out for me at all, this was a nice change of pace. If you are a fan of the first film, I will not take away from your enjoyment of it, merely that I thankfully got the film I enjoyed within the second.

 

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1) 10 Crazy Things You Didn't Know About Ghoulies, written by Jake Dee and published for Screen Rant on October 31st 2019.

2) Interview with Luca Bercovici (Ghoulies), written and published for Love-it-Loud on June 28th 2018. Retrieved August 24th 2018 on the Web Archive.

The Funhouse (1981)

 

Director: Tobe Hooper

Screenplay: Larry Block

Cast: Elizabeth Berridge as Amy Harper; Cooper Huckabee as Buzz; Largo Woodruff as Liz Duncan; Miles Chapin as Richie; Kevin Conway as Freak Show Barker / Strip Show Barker / Conrad Straker (The Funhouse Barker); Wayne Doba as Gunther Twibunt (The Monster); Sylvia Miles as Madame Zena; William Finley as Marco the Magnificent

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

When you're stoned, Charles Manson is a terrific guy.

Tobe Hooper plus Universal Pictures equals a Video Nasty, and this is a higher budget and prestige title among the Nasties, normally independent productions or non-American studio films, and evidence that no one was particularly safe. In the case of The Funhouse, far from the nastiest of the slasher movies from this era entirely, I entirely suspect the infamy of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) filters through this, the film which Tobe Hooper as a director immediately gained a reputation and notoriety for. (There is also another theory that this was mistaken for The Last House on Dead End Street (1977), which was titled The Fun House on British VHS¹, a film which for another day has to be seen to be believed as well as being legitimately gruesome in content). This presents an important part of Tobe Hooper's career, as it was the one made after Salem's Lot (1979), Hooper's seminal and (large scale) TV mini-series/film, his first steps into mainstream filmmaking. This as a result is a change of pace, with Hooper clearly interested with the carnival setting itself, enticed by the chance to film at a real one, an east coast production shot in Miami, Florida in reality¹, and with real rides and numerous extras onscreen to bring out the atmosphere.

I have a bias for carnival/circus films, so naturally I like The Funhouse even without factoring in it being a solid slow burn horror film, where even marginalized titles like Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), which people thought stole the 25th Best Picture Oscar from High Noon (1952), is a favourite for depicting historically this fascinating area of popular entertainment. Carnivals and circuses I realise are very different things, but they form a connection in my mind, as travelling entertainments which feel marginalised in the modern world, of spectacle and the reality of them, alongside the graft and in the case of carnivals, the ways they exist entirely on selling spectacle whilst even only providing the illusion. With their own worlds of aesthetic and figures that have to travel in the shows, they are all enticing, and in terms of the carnival by itself, The Funhouse is the same even if it plays to the stereotypes of them being places of the marginalised and the dangerous. Carnivals, more so than circuses, have had a legacy in cinema which is not just the infamous Tod Browning film Freaks (1932), but even film noir in Nightmare Alley, the 1947 and 2021 versions, of places ran by outsiders and with their own rules. Their posters displaying the now politically incorrect freak shows to their faded colours on the rides have a palpable energy to them which The Funhouse fully succeeds in bringing in.

Opening with a fake out twist combining Psycho (1960) and Halloween (1978) in one, if with the creepiness of a little brother inappropriately terrorising his older sister in the shower, we are also already seeing the time when slashers were prolific for this one to be commissioned, and could also nod to their lineage. The set up is simple. Four people - our female lead Amy (Elizabeth Berridge), on a date with her boyfriend Buzz (Cooper Huckabee), with their male and female friend - are at a carnival haunted with rumours of two kids killed there in another town. The film is methodical, where a large portion of the film is entirely feeding off the mood of the location, a world that makes the film compelling to witness if of another age. No carnival would be allowed to be like this one nowadays - we could probably get the exotic sexy dancing tent for an adult show, but the idea of an erotic female strip show near the rides kids are on reveals the layers of this culture from the past. The same goes to the carnival freak show, where alongside the prop things in jars here involves real animals born with physical deformities brought into the film, sad cows you wish to pet, with twin heads melding together or missing part of their face, immortalised onscreen. Even details you may miss add to this world, such as the fact one of the leads, actor Kevin Conway, is playing all three of the carnival barkers, not just the fun house's who is a central figure, adding layers in whether they are separate people or related.

As a slasher, it barely qualifies due to this lengthy set-up, where the terror comes in very late as, deciding to stay in the funhouse overnight, this ill-advised decision leads to the central quartet to witness a murder. This is not a bad thing as, alongside the fact it allows William Finley to cameo as a drunk Dracula magician, it gives the film so much more emphasis on the characters within pure pulp, not a lot of deaths transpiring for the genre but a lot more atmosphere produced as a result, drawing the viewer in to engage. Sometimes the style and presentation is enough, and being able to soak in a natural fairground environment for a large portion was worth it in sacrifice of the tropes of the slasher genre expected from the time. It helps this is the best funhouse you wish did exist; even if Humpty Dumpty is inexplicably there in the foreground at one point next to stereotypical cannibalistic tribesmen, the production design is exceptional when the film is mostly confined to this location in the finale, a vivid place especially with the creepy but exceptionally made animatronics, made by people who specialised in this in real life. Helping as well is that this is Hooper's first film in widescreen, the unrelenting and unnerving energy he had in his films before transitioning into a new style for him, with the cinematographer for Walter Hill's The Warriors (1979), Andrew Laszlo, and production designer Mort Rabinowitz in tow to give this ill-reputed Video Nasty a credible style.

The intensity of Hooper's films before, when the chaos starts, is still here, and it is apt that by the end, this wonderland of lights and rides ends with traumatised figures of various ages, even if the body count would be considered pitiful for many. How this managed to get on the Video Nasties list is curious, as speculated in the first half, but I am glad with hindsight it did, as this underappreciated film in its director's filmography, about to enter a period of vibrant and even weird films in the eighties, was allowed to grab attention even among the more notorious movies form the list.

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1) Slashback! Something Not Quite Human is Waiting in THE FUNHOUSE (1981), written by Gregory Burkart for Blumhouse.com, published on February 16th 2016 and preserved on web.archive.org.

Non Abstract-Review: Carnival Magic (1981)

From https://www.grindhousedatabase.com/
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Director: Al Adamson

Screenplay: Mark Weston and Bob Levine

Cast: Don Stewart as Markov; Jennifer Houlton as Ellen; Howard Segal as David; Regina Carrol as Kate; Joe Cirillo as Kirk; Mark Weston as Stoney; Charles Reynolds as Dr. Poole; Diane Kettering as Kim

Synopsis: The Stoney Martin Carnival is hitting hard times, but their salvation and draw for larger crowds is already on their premises. One of the carnival's acts Markov the Magician has a friend named Alex he hasn't let anyone meet, who happens to be a talking chimpanzee.

Before we get to Carnival Magic, there is the unfortunate tale of director Al Adamson which hands a spectre over his work. This is something to remember whilst we have it shown on the 2017 reboot Mystery Science Theatre 3000, alongside the fact Adamson himself is a curiosity in cult cinema. The infamous director of Dracula Vs. Frankenstein (1971) is idiosyncratic but not from the context for many of being a loved director - infamously throughout his incredible tome Nightmare U.S.A, about American independent horror films, Stephen Thrower's reviews about Al Adamson films get a bit personal in their comments. Adamson to his credit is still talked of today, and thankfully not just for the unfortunate real life ending, that after he killed by his live-in contractor and had his body hidden beneath the concrete and tile-covered floor where his hot tub once sat in 1995.

Thankfully the tale of Carnival Magic, including its real life tale, is light hearted and weird when, after a string of exploitation and horror films, Adamson wanted to make a family film. Just after Clint Eastwood struck box office gold with Every Which Way But Loose (1978), clearly Adamson decided to reinterpret this and the famous Beatles song Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My [Talking] Monkey by way of carnival related melodrama. Said "me" is Markov the Magnificent, raised as an orphan by monks in Nepal and taught supernatural abilities, from being able to talk to animals to bending iron bars and even being able to let others do so by touching them. The monkey is Alex or Alexander the Great, a talking chimpanzee that Markov has had living in his trailer in secret until the owner's daughter Ellen (Jennifer Houlton) convinces him to include Alex in his act. Said Alex, arguably the talking monkey who mumbles his words that most in cinema as a complete mush mouth, is talented but also slightly perverted when he steals the magic assistant Kate's underwear, played by Adamson's muse and wife Regina Carrol, and in lieu of another box office smash, Smokey and the Bandit (1977), even gets into a high-speed chase from the police.

It's the template you'd find in future family films, barring the stealing of lingerie, with Markov's show drawing both the patrons but also the envy of Kirk, the lion tamer jealous his status has been usurped. There's also the issue of Ellen wanting to grow up as a woman than a child nicknamed "Buddy" by her father, much to his concern when she becomes romantically linked to the carnival's accountant. Carnival Magic for three-fourths of its length is, to put it bluntly, painfully dull. Large portions of it consists of a lot of angst ridden drama which leads to characters approaching each other in a random location, especially the woods, and getting into moralistic conversations about overcoming the loss of loved ones or the responsibilities as a father. Adamson wants to convey a message in spite of being opposed to pace and entertainment; even its own genre, as there's no children in the main cast either, a family film mainly consisting of middle aged men and with Adamson's wife Regina Carrol showing a surprising amount, with her full figure and low cut tops, you wouldn't be able to get away in modern "family friendly" viewing.

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It's a slog, but then, as if to redeem Carnival Magic or to force it to exist for me as a film to remember, it gets increasingly weirder as the finale approaches. There is material which is absolutely too dark for children to see, when Kirk slaps his girlfriend around as response to kidnapping Alex to give him to a scientist, a scientist who explicitly wants to vivisect him despite even his staff showing remorse to the idea and seeing a visibly sentient animal strapped to the bed. The escalation from there becomes insane...

[Major Spoilers]

...when Alex tries to commit suicide with poison, which is a moment which cannot be described in anyway but dumbfoundment, regardless of the target audience, of how Carnival Magic has entered into this territory. For all the mind numbing content of before, this is where a madness takes place more so as everything is taken deathly serious. There's a perverseness, unsure whether to laugh or feel startlement, as Alex is taken to a human hospital and has a conventional death bed scene with the heart rate monitor used for dramatic effect. Even if he recovers, there's still a flat line, and the power of love and psychic ability involved just before smash cutting the end credits and a carnival parade in the streets. The emotional tugging of the heart strings, contrasted by it being an actual chimpanzee on the bed, regardless of Darwin's theories of evolution, is truly surreal and distorts how a viewer is meant to read all this.

[Spoilers End]

Does it redeem Carnival Magic? No, but what transpires in the final act puts a cherry on the bizarre experience and makes it unforgettable. Not surprisingly, Carnival Magic was lost in time until Alamo Drafthouse programmer Zack Carlson found a print and started showing it in the early 2010s. More prints actually existed then he presumed, but the discovery of the film was a brief jolt of morbid excitement for its perverseness, shown on Turner Classic Movies and even getting a Blu Ray release back before films like this, such as Adamson's own Dracula Vs. Frankenstein, were getting even 2k and 4k restorations. Even Al Adamson has benefitted from this resurgence through films like Carnival Magic, a happy conclusion that should outshine his tragic end. Again, Carnival Magic can be agony rather than pleasurable, but the car crash that was its conclusion is legitimately bonkers. If anything, the trajectory from inanity to this ending is a hell of a lot more emotionally compelling to experience as a viewer than anything more conventional. 

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Clownhouse (1989)

From https://horrorpediadotcom.files.wordpress.com/
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Director: Victor Salva

Screenplay: Victor Salva

Cast: Nathan Forrest Winters ( as Casey); Brian McHugh (as Geoffrey); Sam Rockwell (as Randy); Michael Jerome West (as Lunatic Cheezo); Byron Weible          (as Lunatic Bippo); David C. Reinecker (as Lunatic Dippo)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #108

Trying to separate the creator from their work can become an ethical issue when their reputations are tarnished by the events outside cinema. Political beliefs, problematic behaviour or in the worst cases, actual crimes. As a fan of Roman Polanski's films, I have to constantly ask this question. With Victor Salva and Clownhouse, there's are even severe questions to be asked as the crime he was convicted for was mid-production of the film, sexual molestation of the child star Nathan Forrest Winters, which causes both incredible discomfort in watching the film but a lingering history afterwards, where the film's nigh on impossible to acquire on physical release and Salva under constant scrutiny whenever he makes another film, even re-releases of his older movies from the likes of Scream Factory leading people to boycott anything involving him. Salva's career afterwards is as conflicting morally for me to consider, juggling between complete obscurity but also moments of mainstream attention that led to  more controversy, from helming a Disney produced film (Powder (1995)) to sustaining himself in the popular consciousness with the Jeepers Creepers series.

Clownhouse, even if there wasn't the troubling stigma built within the project, wouldn't be with an worth for me anyway. If the film was the same regardless of Salva's crime, it's still a turgid late eighties shocker, one which emphasises my growing disdain for stalk and scare scenes, those post the slasher boom which presume that a sudden jump scare is enough to sustain a film, not that they're only affective when set up well or that even some fun beyond them is required for a film to actually be entertaining or an actual horror film. A large part of the film is sadly following three unlikable male protagonists (Winters¸ Brian McHugh and Sam Rockwell), three brothers who spend most of the narrative teasing and insulting each other, without any sense of bond between them, as mental asylum patients dressed as clowns occasionally appear in the shadows constantly hinting at suspense that only takes place in the finale.

It's only when this is all set up at the circus that the film seems vaguely interesting. Inherently like Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse (1981), the carnival as a film setting is inherently fascinating as seeing the central character's fear of clowns being visibly tested, showing both how fascinating clowns are as a centuries old concept but also why they would be scary with their grease painted faces, their exaggeration of mannerism and the harlequin like costumes. Three quarters of Clownhouse before and after this however are the three leads arguing whilst various fake scares and near shocks by the killer clowns, all of which become tedious quickly. The trite moral of protagonist Casey having to overcome his fears is made disturbing knowing actor WIlliams was the victim of Salva's off-camera acts, making it an uncomfortable position for him to have to speak dialogue written by Salva about escaping his fears. On the other side of the spectrum, it's amazing that whilst Sam Rockwell is a great actor as an adult, it also amazing how atrocious he is here, so wooden that it's a case that when people started to notice him from Galaxy Quest (1999) onwards he improved in his acting skills immensely over ten years.

The music is dreadful, the worst case of generic synthesizer music you can hear. Also knowing what was taking place mid-production with Salva, the obsession with the three young leads being constantly shirtless, half dressed or nearly naked is a pertinent example of the camera gaze and how it objectifies individuals of any gender in such an extreme and problematic way. My viewing of Clownhouse was a morbid experience, somewhat thankful in knowing there's no reason ever to watch it again. Tragically however it also exists as an actual crime having been committed whilst it was being made, which makes the experience worse to consider. 

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Malatesta's Carnival of Blood (1973)

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Director: Christopher Speeth

Screenplay: Werner Liepolt

Cast: Janine Carazo (as Vena); Jerome Dempsey (as Blood); Daniel Dietrich (as Malatesta) Lenny Baker (as Sonja); Hervé Villechaize (as Bobo); William Preston (as Sticker)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #81

Synopsis: At a carnival fairground, a family hired to run one of the amusement stands learns too late that a family of blood drinking, subterranean cannibals live underneath the site.

The likes of Malatesta's Carnival of Blood encapsulates what's rewarding about American exploitation and horror cinema from the seventies for me, regional productions with plenty of virtues alongside a lot of confounding aspects that make me feel as if I've been induced with a hallucinogenic whilst watching them adding to their personalities. Right from its survival through word of mouth and the director Christopher Speeth's own print of the movie, it's a grimy and eccentric experience where even the aspects that could be seen as shambolic are virtues too. The theme park itself where the film is filmed at is enticing in itself for this horror film with its wooden rollercoaster and grotty Tunnel of Love, evoking the similar emotion of local seaside fairs in my home country of England, of black stained swan boats and collapsing miniature golf courses away from the pristine tourist attractions,  fascinating for me for this decay alongside their colours and innocence. It makes perfect sense, in a purely constructed environment of strange rides in the shape of animals and ghost trains, for there to be cannibals behind the staff doors underground watching silent films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) in their free time. For Hervé Villechaize to suddenly appear, in the cutting abruptly to a new scene, as Bobo the Dwarf warning the female protagonist Vena (Janine Carazo) of the place whilst waving a shooting gallery rifle at her. A place where it's absurd when the titular Malatesta (Daniel Dietrich) to be riding a rollercoaster by himself, (imagine a more competent version of the Master from Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) in a Dracula cape and black suit), but also making sense within the completely artificial environment where attractions already exaggerate fantastical iconography for rides.

Technical Detail:

That this weaves in avant-garde aspects into the madness is unexpected but leads to the film becoming more delirious. The general rawness of the film, a lived-in quality in its setting and performances, immediately appeals to me and adds a far greater sense of believability, which is a lot of the reason why seventies films, even when they can be amateurish and wooden in tone at points, have become so much more rewarding than a lot of the more modern horror movies which are visibly contrived with glossy aesthetics. The film sets the tone perfectly for how odd it will be in the first scene, Lenny Baker as a female fortune teller Sonja in a cramped, claustrophobic room where the table is actually revolving in space in from of the camera and the dialogue she utters to the lead protagonist has a cryptic, slurred quality to it.

The underground environments, thanks to the work of future architects Richard Stange and Alan Johnson with various craftspeople and artists, are the most rewarding aspect of the whole film, fully artificial and surreal environments entirely made from junk, where a lot of red installation foam, popcorn bags and various pieces of debris make up living art installations where extras roam about whining, babbling, eating prop meat and even burst into traditional American songbook pieces. An upside down, plastic cup toothed Volkswagen on chains as a swing. A room full of dolls. A blood draining machine, corpse grinder hybrid that looks like it was made from papier-mâché. Creations that are deliberately artificial but work some perfectly in terms of being deliberately out-there whilst being made of tangible materials, Michel Gondry is he went through an evil period, the textual nature to it all, in dank waterlogged rooms or the cavernous, multi-floor areas of the underground, adding to the mystery and sense of scale to the cannibal's home in a lo-fi, high art style. Adding to this madness is the psychoacoustic noises created by Dr. Sheridan D. Speeth to induce subliminal fear into the viewer. These noises aren't subtle in the slightest, atonal drones that rear up in the soundtrack clearly, but they add to the cacophony of screams and cryptic dialogue onscreen without becoming an audiovisual mess, instead being appropriate unnerving.

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Weird

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

One of the greatest appeals to American exploitation cinema, as the sequel to Arrow Video's American Horror Project set is something I'm in dire need of even above major films getting a release from them, is a unique style to them that is as distinct and rewarding as Italian horror cinema is for me too. The mix of realism in cast and locations, even amateur casting and less than perfect set choices, combined with characters actors in prominent roles - William Preston with a distinct glass eye and greenish-grey pancake makeup as the deranged litter picking ghoul or Jerome Dempsey as Mr. Blood, Malatesta's underling who runs the theme park and realises flamboyant dialogue whilst managing to still have dignity entering a scene in a dodgem car.

The result's a verisimilitude balanced with unpredictability, where even after multiple rewatches a loopiness to the film stays that's infectious, all the while the solid foundation of interest characters and character actor performances keeps the film afloat. The naturalism goes as far as all the damage the surviving print restoration that's permanently scarred the film, eccentricity dripping off it including possibly the most spoilt, moody child in horror cinema who demands a rubber chicken from the shooting gallery stand only to throw it to the floor immediately afterwards, or someone making the ill-advised decision to ride a rollercoaster late at night by themselves by way of unexpected decapitation. The screenplay by Werner Liepolt is also appropriately off-kilter, particularly its grabbing of the kind of material usually found from a gothic movie such as Malatesta as the cape wearing debonair man who possesses many faces, including one to induce madness in others, alongside the various fragments of vampirism included in the eccentric cannibals' behaviour, wooden stakes being waved cheatingly and blood being drained from victims.

Personal Opinion:

Slowly growing into a personal favourite. Openly admitting that its ramshackle at times, this is yet the kind of oddity from the US in the seventies that, with some legitimately good technical and story tale qualities, I can appreciate for its strange results but as much for what it does so well.

From http://gruesomemagazine.com/wp-content/
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Halloween 31 For 31: Midori (1992)

From http://www.trashmutant.com/uploads/1/0/9
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Director: Hiroshi Harada

Screenplay: Hiroshi Harada

(Voice) Cast: Minako Naka (as Midori); Norihiko Morishita (as Wonder Masanitsu); Keinosuke Okamoto (as Koijirô Arashi); Kazuyoshi Hayashi (as Akaza); Yoshifumi Nomura (as Muchisute)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #41

A 1000 Anime Crossover

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque; Psychotronic; Weird

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

Midori is an infamous work, an animated adaptation of Suehiro Maruo's ero-guro manga Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show (1984), where a young girl finds herself trapped as part of a travelling carnival freak show in nineteen twenties Japan, created by one man, the former industry animator Hiroshi Harada who became an underground filmmaker. The result here of years of hard work is split into two divisive halves. The first is the most transgressive, responsible for this film's notorious reputation, a variety of horrifying yet lovingly drawn images of the worst in humanity, mainly still images with bursts of fluid movement, realistic but with incredibly detailed colour and exaggerated carnival characters with various bodily deformities and distinctions.

The bookending experimentation with surreal narration and the second half, when salvation is available for the heroine, is where Midori crosses into the abstract, a fully formed short length narrative which becomes more coherent and interesting but one which is immersed in the experimental style the film from the beginning has. From the dream sequences to the body horror to scenes such as a character called Wonder Masanitsu, a dwarf magician with mesmerizing abilities, causing a mass hallucinatory freak-out on an unsuspecting audience, the animation has a creepy, unreal tone added to by music by J. A. Seazer and Hiroshi Harada's expert craftsmanship as an animator.

Personal Opinion:

For the full review of Midori, follow the link HERE.

From http://images.tcj.com/2013/05/63cbe79e-f21f-44d5-
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Freaks (1932)

From http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/wp-content/
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Director: Tod Browning

Screenplay: Tod Robbins

Cast: Wallace Ford (as Phroso); Leila Hyams (as Venus); Olga Baclanova (as Cleopatra); Roscoe Ates (as Roscoe); Henry Victor (as Hercules); Harry Earles (as Hans)

Synopsis: Within a travelling carnival and its sideshow "freak" attractions, the owner Hans (Earles), a midget, falls in love with the Amazonian trapeze artist Cleopatra (Baclanova). Unfortunately Cleopatra is in cahoots with the strongman Hercules (Victor), and the pair as well as being cruel and abusive to those within the sideshow have a plan for Cleo to marry Hans and poison him to claim his financial inheritance. However, as a carnival barker who bookends the film states, the sideshow "freaks" including a living torso, a bearded woman and "Pinheads" live by a code. In a world where they are discriminated against, they have their own community where they protect each other and deal with their own foibles; those from the outside who befriend them, including animal trainer Venus (Hyams) and Phroso the Clown (Ford), will be treated as equals, while those who trespass against them will suffer horrible consequences.

A lot of cineastes will know of Freak's notoriety. Banned in the United Kingdom, causing outrage in its country of origins, sold to Dwain Esper to be churned out on the grindhouse tent circuit until it was critically revaluated, living with the reputation as a thirties horror film that still surprises. More so today with political correctness, the film from the title to some of the words in the synopsis will be even more uncomfortable without having seen the film, and even to the cast it was a film both championed but also damned for its depiction of those with physical differences. As someone who grew up with a learning disability, autism, whilst I cannot compare to someone like Prince Randian, the living torso, who had no limbs to speak of, viewing Freaks more and more since I saw it the first time in college film studies has a different perspective for me as someone not part of "normal" society even if it's not because of a physical handicap.

From http://breakfastwithplato.com/wp-content/uploads/
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In testament to the film, Freaks never mocks the titular individuals. While in broad brushes depicting the lives within a circus, the brief snippets of a community are rich as they stand. Tod Browning did run away with the circus when he was young and throughout there are many aspects to the film that couldn't be seen in anyway but heartening. A community where everyone helped each other, married and had kids as the human skeleton and the bearded lady do in one scene, and whilst the film is fictitious the normalisation of everyone's lives and letting actual sideshow attractions act is a huge virtue. The rawness of amateur performers is matched by the charisma of everyone, from Schlitzie the pinhead (actually a man playing a woman) to the already mentioned Prince Randian, who only gets one moment but shines just from showing how you don't need limbs to light a cigarette. That the film was cut down to only around an hour does mean a lot was probably lost that would've been exceptional to see, but what snippets remain are utterly inspiring and subversive in seeing these people be filmed having meals and merely gossiping between themselves. This is where even someone like myself with a mental disability can embrace this film more beyond a love of the movie, where not only is there solidarity between the sideshow, but also how it shows how ordinary they are even if their lives travelling could've been exciting and full of gossip. The film's in the same vein of the Universal horror movies of the thirties that it was meant to capitalise on, a lurid carnival drama also in the vein of the decade later Nightmare Alley (1947) where deceit and murder plots bubble up. Barring a finale where people crawl in the mud during a rainstorm with knifes ready, the horror movie moment, this exists in-between dramas as a pot-boiler which straddles the line between respectability and being offensive. The film for me is the former, but it still gladly provokes taboos. Just before the Hays Code, which was already created, finally clamped down on what it perceived to be morally offensive material, you had films in the early thirties which still stand out for how brazen and quite progressive they still are. Hans is openly wooing Cleopatra, hinting of an eroticism that is still not tackled in cinema a great deal, and more openly subversive is to be found the subplot with real life Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton playing sisters who are planning to marry their respective suitors, one of the funniest parts of the film for imagining how the arguments with the sister-in-law is going to turn out like but also hinting at more when both sisters can feel the sensations of the other.

From http://www.popoptiq.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/freaks1.png

You can easily connect Freaks, even though it was and always will have meant to be a horror movie to scare, to the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Harmony Korine, Lars von Trier's The Idiots (1998) and Ulrich Seidl, all of which have prodded the taboos of either (or both) physical and mental disability, Freaks by possible coincidence being an ancestor of them in disregarding the safety bubble used around the subject. Whilst no way near as explicit as those films, and not in their cult/art cinema environment, this still does everything those examples do - showing the disabled as human beings, far from perfect, passionate and even having sexual desire. This doesn't detract from Freaks being a fun film, with a proto-Tales From The Crypt twist that's nasty, but the humanity is still worth relishing too.

From http://filmint.nu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Freaks-2.jpg

Technical Detail:

The one flaw with Freaks that I've finally overcome, but must be bared in mind, is that as an early thirties movie, it had to grapple with the introduction of sound and how films would now have to be made, visible in its basic cinematic structure. Browning was said never to be comfortable with sound - Dracula (1931) is an utterly sluggish and misshapen creation even with Bela Lugosi - and Freaks is a quietly put together work as a result of this. The content is what Freaks succeeds though, not elaborate technique you can find in another great film like Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). This was why it took a while for me to fully embrace Freaks over all these years, superficiality no longer a bias.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WeC8r2kZajo/maxresdefault.jpg

Abstract Spectrum: None

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

The term "grotesque" could've been used but for me that would be utterly offensive to the people in the film. There should be a distancing of that word away from connotations of physical deformity and disability by itself barring the extreme realms of body horror and its fictitious exaggerations. Grotesque for me should represent exaggeration and transgressive material like taboo sexuality or the worst in mankind's behaviour. I could use the word for if I cover an Ulrich Seidl film. Another work based around a carnival "freakshow", the notorious anime Midori (1992), could also qualify for the word as would Horrors of Malformed Men (1969), a film banned in its home country exactly for the concerns of it being offensive to the disabled but firmly entrenched in a truly strange reality instead.

Aside from this, Freaks isn't a weird film at all. Barring having real sideshow performers play themselves rather than using practical effects, nothing is unconventional from other movies. Nothing is abstract and there is no cinematic techniques which effect the content. Having the performers be real sideshow attractions is confrontational, causing people to react and if the legend is true it caused a violent reaction at its original premier. The rest of the film is a melodrama with lots of dialogue, mostly if not all shot statically without anything to baffle. Now if what I've heard is true about Tod Browning's silent films, where dialogue wasn't an issue, films like The Unknown (1927) which made his name with Lon Chaney could be awesome and utterly strange too.

From http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/styles/full/public/image/
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Personal Opinion:

This was and still is a unique film, still utterly provocative to a modern audience, and despite its technical limitations, the boldness of the premise is still strong. It could be seen as sad, it would still be shocking, but firmly on the side of the titular characters, it champions them as much as it would offend others. This is also a film which doesn't fall into the annoying convention of the normal defeating the outsider evil. Here instead it's the outsiders who are the good people and the apparently normal people are evil, a simple idea far and away more relevant and more entertaining now in a fun film than most horror movies that do the opposite.