Coven (1997)

 

Director: Mark Borchardt

Screenplay: Mark Borchardt

Cast: Mark Borchardt as Mike, Tom Schimmels as Steve, Miriam Frost as Sharon, Robert Richard Jorge as Goodman, Sherrie Beaupre as Daesa, Jack Bennett, Mark Nadolski, Scott Berendt, Barbara Zanger, Donna McMaster, Mike Schank, Cindy Snyder, Nancy Williams, and Wayne Bubois as support group members.

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

For all the infamy of the film pronounced “oven”, from the acclaimed documentary American Movie (1999) about this film and its director-writer-lead Mark Borchardt, what about the film at the centre of that story? What about the short film Coven itself?

Coven is actually great and, even as someone who has defended shot-on-video and no budget films which have wavering acting and questionable plot tangents, it is actually one of the best I have seen. It is not perfect, but is a moody tale where our lead Mike, played by Borchardt, ends up in a hospital after using prescription drugs to help him reach a writing deadline, only to have overdone it to severe bodily harm. Shot in stark monochromatic 16mm film, he ends up pressured by a friend to join a small addicts anonymous group he is part of. It ends up with a more pulp turn – they are set up as a literal coven whose methods of helping their members stay sober involve questionable spiritual transcendence – and whilst it might be criticized for contradicting the sympathetic nature of the members, as I’ll get into, I have softened to this especially as Borchardt for a film that goes for a more complicated psychodrama in its tiny length and tiny budget.

A part of this is also the possibility, whilst leaning to there being a real cult holding sway in an addict’s consolation group, that as much of the paranoia is caused by the lead Mike’s own fed by his drug use, even using stimulants like speed when already part of the group and meant to be overcoming this substance abuse. This sense of all that what is not it seems, whilst not perfect, is set up to the director’s credit when he leaves the hospital from his initial incident, as he witnesses a woman on a gurney suddenly goes into a fit in the elevator, all before he even meets the coven. Even going to a dealer for said speed when he is meant to be on the recovery wagon, it becomes explicit that, even if the cult is real, our lead is already on the edge and there is still a sense of him adding to his own terrors. With a celebratory sole drink with the group where they’ve likely spiked his, his hallucinations like seeing the members confess to murder or starting speaking gibberish, or seeing a male priest on the floor of the public building bathroom they are in starting to mutter apocalyptic babble, there is as much felt this time seeing the sequence with the sense his own demons are feeding them as much as the cult feeding on them.

The mood helps with Coven even when it is literal and those are real hooded cultists the lead is seeing in the Wisconsin woods even high on speed. The opening surreal scene for a film less than forty minutes establishes Borchardt had more on his mind even if American Movie depicted the production’s difficulties, Borchardt running on a rural road with an old guy ranting in a passing car about religion and dead bodies on a road depicting a subjective nightmare. Helping considerably is the shooting within Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin where the rural small town as seen here in stark black and white adds the best production values for a tiny budget film. Not just for the advantages of woodland for any micro budget film where you don’t mind permits, but that, shot at a time when the trees were bare of leaves in winter and look skeletal, with the sky at times washed out white, it looks appropriately ominous for a film which struggled with taking a long time to be completely finished. It has a naturalism with the locations Borchardt shot, likely with local non-actors or local actors in dialogue roles, in real bars and public buildings, but with the choice of monochrome and the production choices, like using post-synched dialogue and sound for moments where the lead’s sanity is slipping, allowing its more fantastical moments to not feel out of place. Without hyperbole, but utmost sympathy, it evokes the front LP cover, let alone with the music itself, of one of my favorite albums Spiderland by Slint, a post rock band from Louisville, Kentucky, and not that far geographically from Wisconsin, nor where its famous cover was photographed at in stark black and white at a quarry lake in Utica Township, Indiana. Spiderland is held as a great album for indie music, but in one of my favorite songs ever Nosferatu Man, you have a potentially cheesy lyrical choice of having a song about a Dracula like vampire living in a rural American community, where he lives with his brides in a place where he constantly has to suffer from the trains running nearby from his castle. That sense of working class, non-metropolis Americana especially when it comes to regional American horror cinema is close to this ideal even with cheesy lines of dialogue and fake red blood, but Coven to its credit manages to allow the unnatural to bleed into blue collar Americana without it feeling tonally wrong. When you have hooded cultists destroying a car with random clubs in weed filled wasteland, possible because the production got hold of an actual car to destroy, it feels not as cheesy as other regional horror films, but like a gang attack where the inappropriate uniform choices without being able to see the faces feels more disturbing.

Helped by the music by Patrick Nettesheim, ultra low budget synth, adds to the atmosphere of an earnest, imperfect but heartfelt attempt at a film, as helped by the naturalism forced onto a film without the budget to have staged locations but shooting in friends’ rooms instead. Coven ends up less subjective at its end in story with the ending becoming a bloody affair in a kitchen, but even that befits the tone of a film that is largely a stripped back homemade drama, especially as one of the more compelling aspects of the entire production are the addicts’ anonymous meetings. Even if they were an actual coven, Mark Borchardt still sets up that its members are there for legitimate reasons, which also feel like real anecdotes that deal with addiction honestly. There are extensive monologues of people talking of their reasons for their addiction, and they all sound painfully real, even the guy who says he started cocaine at twelve or the more explicitly humorous one of another man who tells with deadpan, to prove a point to an official about being stoned, coming to a meeting on the subject whilst high on acid. There are wives whose husbands who stuck out miserable jobs for benefits, people with depression, and men and women of all ages and concerns in their addictions. It all violently contrast the reputation I first learnt of Coven as being a butt of jokes as a disastrous low budget production in their severity, and they add a moral side to the short I have to praise fully. Even our lead Mike, having to make the rent by writing, which caused the damage to himself, is salient in the idea that, in the coven recruiting members, they literally brought in the desperate and the miserable with real problems they could easily bend to their will.

Even with its finale, of the cult wanting to create new members but never explicitly saying anything sinister about their souls and still concerns of enlightening, adds to a different sort of sinister to the story in terms of interpretation. With one cultist having their head caved into a kitchen drawer, it is a sinister that suggests that our lead may have presumed to have fended for his life, but just killed some innocent people in his own kitchen in a cultist fed mental breakdown. That is the things that I can legitimately say Mark Borchardt was able to pull off with Coven, and credit to American Movie, whilst that film became the iconic part of Borchardt’s own career, it thankfully led to people like me wanting to track the original short down. American Movie is a film I want to return to as its own work, even if tied to this fully with a symbolic umbilical cord, but Coven itself is something I wish with hindsight gets more attention. More so especially from the communities which grew, decades after especially in the United States, for shot-on-video and ultra low budget genre films, where they get Blu Ray releases even if preserved on VHS transfers with visible distortion from age and the materials used. It feels like one of the grand tent poles for this fan base that needs more recognition for its virtues with hindsight.

CO/MA (2004)

 

Director: Mike Figgis (with Steve Hudson, Johnny O'Reilly, Hanna Slak and Jovan Arsenic)

Screenplay: Jovan Arsenic, Mike Figgis, Steve Hudson, Fabian Joest Passamonte, Johnny O'Reilly and Hanna Slak

Cast: Aleksandra Balmazovic as Susi, Aljosa Kovacic as Mickey Dortville, Thekla Reuten as Isabella, Fabian Joest Passamonte as Prof.Kurt, Jesper Christensen as Weissman, Lana Baric as Edwina, Isabella Parkinson as Joanna, Feo Aladag as Ellen, Vladimir Bouchier as Shukov, Doris Schretzmayer as Dorothy

An Abstract Candidate

 

CO/MA is the kind of film which skitters between genres. For starters, it may be credulous, frankly questionable, to call this a "horror" film as I had intended to. For most, there is only the scene of one of the actress in this communal filming project being haunted by a ghost girl, and that is not enough to qualify for the genre. I would argue there are plenty of moments which do fit the tone even if this would be the most disappointing film to watch on Halloween. The rest of CO/MA is just as difficult to pin down, as for a work most would call a "documentary", even that is questionable. What we have instead is a curious tonally shifting chimera that is CO/MA, something truly peculiar and worthy of making excuses of, as tentative for a "horror" review or at any context, for me to get away with covering this during any season.

This belongs to an era I slowly crept into my cineaste hobby, which is growing up in the 2000s as a teenager and, by the time of 2008 when I became a young adult and had fully started to develop into this. This era, from when they were first released in the late nineties but especially the 2000s, is an entire "DVD era" of cinema which will hopefully get its own cult assessment. Despite the calls of its demise, in the streaming era and the existence of better formats for high definition images, DVDs are still being released, but I am creating a term for one specific era. One, even if they got very limited cinema runs, had many titles released on the format along straight-to-video titles which are forgotten and/or represent some of the era's greatest obsessions in terms of pop culture in general. In the case of CO/MA, I can completely understand this being viewed as pretentious if anyone has ever remembered this production exists. I did because, even before I was able to catch up with films like this, I was subscribing to a DVD review magazine. The review was pretty damning from memory, but this still lingered in my mind for decades before I could finally watch it and get rid of it from my mind palace To Get To List. Made in mind to reality television's popularity at the time, the vibes of horror are strong enough to also nod to as its genre, but there is also the comedy segments, the attempts to blur reality and fiction, the soap opera pastiche set in a hospital the commune in the centre which the central project of the production we follow, and other bits and pieces. In the end, CO/MA is neither and all of these.

It is also a Mike Figgis production, which adds a stranger air to all this, an English filmmaker who made films like Internal Affairs (1990) with Richard Gere, and Leaving Las Vegas (1995) where Nicolas Cage won the best acting Oscar. By 2000 however, he slowly started to move entirely away from larger budget films and increasingly experimental productions, both working with more digital filmmaking and also bold experiments like Timecode (2000) and Hotel (2001). Those two mark a turning point, effectively running with the four screen concept Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey developed in Chelsea Girls (1966), having four separate screens showing different films at the same time, with Timecode telling the same film from four different cameras, Hotel entirely different stories running at the same time. With the exception of Cold Creek Manor (2003), Figgis ditched "conventional" filmmaking, openly embracing his interest in digital camera filmmaking and experimentation, and the comment I made earlier about the "DVD era" of cinema has Figgis' name in the unwritten encyclopaedia on the subject. Films like Love Live Long (2008), where he took advantage of filming at a Gumball Rally racing competition to make an improvised erotic drama, are productions most people have no idea of the existence of, lost to time unless an old DVD is found second hand or on streaming. CO/MA is among these, needing this comically long prologue to set off the review because it is the only way to properly explain where CO/MA came to be. It is a project told to us to start in November 2004 at a film studio in Slovakia, where Mike Figgis and a group of actors have started a filmmaking master class with him leading, one where everyone is to collaborate on this project we the viewer are watching.

Already it is confusing things when, in the first conversations we see recorded, Figgis raises concerns that he will be marked as the director legally on the film credits, but that is subject in the collaborative production as a truth. He says it might "be crap", and one of the collaborators considers if they might say it is not legal to screen this master class if they ever decide to once they have spent finishing the production. Making explicit reference to The Blair Witch Project (1999), and with reality television in its mind, you can time stamp this to the early 2000s. These extensive conversations are continuous through the film, where people in this collaborative effort are already staying outside in disagreement to the project's trajectory before they have even considered what to make, and it is all playing to the idea of whether this is all real or not. Figgis states onscreen that he wants to blur the lines between what is real and when an actor might be lying, but as the tone and genres start to blur in general, what even the significant point of CO/MA is becomes of debate. You can make the justifiable argument this was not a successful project. For me, fascinated by these out-pourings of human creativity and their emotions, faked or real, it was a compelling piece even if "indulgent" is apt too.

Considering the likes of Timecode, this was inevitable. That and, with the black and white scenes, including those of actors talking the screen to the viewers, Big Brother's influence alongside the reality television shows that came at this time are seen imprinted on this film, what was on the tip of everyone's tongue whether they wanted to admit it or not. A year before this, New Line Cinema took a risk on The Real Cancun (2003), a theatrical reality film which was shot at spring break in Cancún, Mexico. It was a box office bomb, and not a film I remember with fondness beyond just curiosity of its existence, but again "DVD-core", if I am to plague the world with a term to describe this era of filmmaking, is a compelling set of films for a variety of reasons. Their use of digital film cameras, with their aged aesthetics, and their attempts to redefine what a "film" meant are worth prodding, with CO/MA clearly looking for a possible outcome that was not the titillation of The Real Cancun, but a more intellectually based experiment.

It definitely breaks reality from the get-go, not really a documentary, and the first nods to horror are found when we have one of the actresses in a toilet cubicle feeling at ill ease of an unknown presence, beginning the hints of the building being haunted or at least the disconnect to the location even if this plot thread is one of many which feel unfinished. They all decide, in the main drive, as a collective to make a soap opera, in mind to strip anything interesting away on purpose. Alongside the strangeness of this, when one of the actresses complains later about the hollowness of her "soap opera performance" and that they apparently agreed to this project in the first place, the tangled web we get suggests otherwise, like a no-horror version of Lars von Trier's The Kingdom franchise if more absurd and less about the horror of that franchise. There are a couple of scenes in a film-within-a-film, with an actual audience, bored by the likes of cooking shows such as Jamie Oliver's, switching over to "The Clinic", with absurd touches coming in with its plot whiplashes, and over-dramatic music. It is one of the better aspects to CO/MA that most of what we get of this pastiche is just the introductions to each new episode, skipping ahead of entire plot cycles with drastic character shifts. Abrupt amnesia, lovers cheating on doctor to take his job and let the cleaner, studying to be one too, become the head of the hospital, secret half-sisters, fake twins for ones supposed to be dead and unknown leukaemia, all of which is deliberately silly. Add to this that there are two bystanders, a male older alcoholic and a British actress who is playing a pathological liar, watching on as the Greek chorus, and The Clinic as a project could have been something from this era of cinema that might have been a proper film you might find released from this era. This is less strange to consider when Lars von Trier once shot an office set comedy, with the digital camera instructed with artificial intelligence to shot however it wanted, called The Boss of It All (2006).

It feels hypocritical as a result, admittedly, to have a critique of soap operas yet playing one out whose strange presentation is actually interesting, but when the actors are flummoxed why they are doing a "bad soap opera", it is clearly another plot strand that is at play, with Mike Figgis playing his role at times as an odd puppet master. He is never cruel or manipulative, choosing soap operas as it is a genre and the most popular one globally in his words, but it is clearer he is trolling the cast. One of the biggest critiques I can make is that, for how long they had to produce the film, which feels like a short production of pure improvisation, it feels like a more fleshed out series of arches were lost in this and we could have gotten a much more complex yet precise work if it had been longer. It is aiming for something more complex but can merely add hints to these plot strands, such as when we get to one of the actresses being honest that she was comfortable filming Figgis' "porno". Truthfully, when the film uses the term "porn" the use is in mind to the fully improvised production with little script and minimal production crew instead, but there is a nod to the potential issues of lack of professional morals to get the right stories, such as a tale from a crew member who says, to cut costs on a failing soap opera, the script created a plague to bump off actors only for that to get high ratings. Nothing is explicit in CO/MA in terms of sexual content, but it is nodded to, with this actress' character in a relationship with a former patient of hers in The Clinic among other implications of the relationships between characters in the hospital setting. The sole explicit scene is a retake of a phone call between this actress and her former patient where, with only hints, she starts heavily breathing her invitation to the woman to go to a cafe whilst rubbing the mobile phone against herself, which with the ominous music used in the scene feels like they were suddenly trying to be like David Lynch.

Those music cues, and the more overt moments where the cast feel at ill-ease in the studio, are enough to justify the fleck of horror as a genre on this film before we get an actual ghost girl with her multicolour basketball in the costume department scaring one of the actresses. This is a movie with really not clear genre but shades of them in a spectrum. In truth, it is a film which does not really clear trajectory to itself, somewhat befitting the narrative it has where there is growing unrest from the group with Figgis as this goes. Some aspects of its trajectory are missing to fully emphasis the point - that there is a sense of discontent and a sense Figgis is antagonising some of them which should have had more scenes of, especially if CO/MA is playing with the idea of what is "real" and "reel". Even if that could be something difficult to capture in b-roll practically or morally, this especially becomes the case when the film starts talking about a conspiracy about who is who eventually, with paranoia growing, which could have added a greater weight to the production if more time was spend on this.

The sense the film drifts off is when it cuts into other tangents in the last half. The horror tangents feel like they are baked into the tone, set up from the start, but eventually we are looking into the production shooting a take on The Exorcist (1973) having managed to get Max von Sydow for one day, or the Jackass crew of the cult MTV series and Johnny Knoxville are brought up as about to appear in The Clinic. Obviously, these are joke moments, with none of these people about to appear, and instead it is all with a sense that as the production for real went on, the commune started to horse about and became less concerned about a serious meaning to the work. This is felt when we get another of the memorable pieces, a three plus minute comedy sketch where a man conjures up a woman in an abandoned film set, wanting to seduce her but with their collected ability to imagine anything they wish leading to legitimately fun comedic beats in a few perfect minutes. Is it enough to justify the whole film though? I think it is telling, when the ending epilogue text comes up, there is a reference (clearly for some humour) that some Slovakia filmmakers walked out the first ever screening, with the pervading sense that CO/MA was never meant to win over a large crowd, but Mike Figgis with these collaborators experimenting for the sake of it. He would become obscurer as a result of these projects, barring one music documentary or occasional TV episode in a whole, entirely focused in these lower budget productions where he would eventually become the editor and the cinematographer.  In this case, it feels less like a tragedy but more that he willing choose this direction, and to be brutally honest, barring my love for Nicolas Cage and some of the older films with enticing premises, these more obscure titles like CO/MA feel far more compelling to consider from him for their complete lack of compromise regardless if they are successful or not.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Metatextual/Stream-of-Consciousness

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

The Curse of the Crying Woman (1963)

 

Director: Rafael Baledón

Screenplay: Rafael Baledón and Fernando Galiana

Cast: Rosita Arenas as Amelia, Abel Salazar as Jaime, Rita Macedo as Selma, Carlos López Moctezuma as Juan, Enrique Lucero as Dr. Daniel Jaramillo

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Moody atmosphere immediately introduces you to this Mexican horror film, referring to the legend of La Llorona, a vengeful ghost who mourned the children she drowned, in a rage due to her husband's infidelity, at bodies of water whilst being a symbol of death or misfortune who hear her weeping. Be it 1933's La Llorona, or The Curse of La Llorona (2019) for the US film industry, this figure has returned over and over the decades, and here in a period drama, we immediately see an alternative take on her as an evil figure. A horse drawn carriage with two men and a young woman make the ill advised decision to drive in the middle of the night in an area where murders have been credited to a beast, and in reality, it is a knife throwing older man, with throttling hands of steel, and his mistress he works under who are the real threat. They neither waste time killing the occupants and draining all the blood from their victims.

This immediately points to a huge virtue of Rafael Baledón's film. The law are naturally concerned it is a madman without real knowledge of the culprits, whilst the film does not hide from the viewers that Aunt Selma (Rita Macedo) is the same person from this prologue, awaiting her niece Amelia (Rosita Arenas) to visit her, on the eve of Amelia's birthday, that naturally plays an integral part of the narrative. A piece of pure Gothic cinema, of an old mansion and a fog shrouded dark nights, it is the worst place for our lead and her husband to be, especially obvious when the mirrors are all covered up, which should be an immediate alarm bell. It is also a delight for a film not to waste time with pointless mystery - we know from get-go the place is cursed, and the greater concern is having found yourself stuck there trying to survive as her aunt wants Amelia to help resurrect the Crying Woman.

The resulting work is a haunted house in filmic form in the best of ways, cobwebbed cellars with torture devices and ghouls on pulleys charging to the camera. Cool production design is here in swathes - corpses attached to wheels of torture, rubber bats, or the cutest rats possibly seen in a horror film in the foreground even if they are meant to represent decay.  Madame Marina, the Crying Woman, is the decayed figure on the wheel of torture here, a figure who sacrificed people for magical powers and who Selma's late husband was researching. She is not even hiding to her niece Amelia that she is taken Marina's lead for power too. Obviously, this is all a metaphor for the idea of trying to cheat death and the immortality that can come from this, to cheat death by sacrificing others. It is an obvious story trope, and honestly a conservative way of seeing things, as horror over the decades has been complicated by stories, even if comedic, which offer witches to vampires to be actually nice people and potentially immortal. A much more interesting modern reading is to interpret Selma as representing a blinded devote who is trying to convince her niece to join a cult, even if it means sacrificing others and her own empathy.

There is also a literal curse where, even with the conclusion of this, the story leaves Amelia with the sense that nothing will be the same for her, adding the more tantalizing and spooky undercurrent to the plot. The set up with Amelia being convinced by Selma to help is a ghoulish mortality tale with the additional advantage that director Rafael Baledón will bring in moments to make an already sumptuous looking period horror film have memorable scenes. Be it German expressionist touches, like the night sky suddenly becoming glaring eyes when Amelia may be turning into a Crying Woman, or the flashback to Selma's past done in reverse negative images, the film is giving an incredible style to what is a rollicking spectacle. It is the kind of production with this careful sense of being well made with a sense of fun, where in that flashback we get a random wolf man in a suit, with no further context, just to add spice to the proceedings without feeling pointlessly random.

This is also factoring in that The Curse of the Crying Woman is still a gruesome film decades after its creation, such as the man left decrepit and incarcerated in a jail cell to be continually punished, only to finally get his revenge on his captor. Or dogs sent to maul police officers even if, cutely, they were clearly shot in some images encouraged to lick a glass screen which the camera is behind to represent rabid dog attacks. It still has a sickly sense of the macabre even in the non-gruesome scenes like this to its advantage. Even on a base pleasure level, with the roof literally coming down in the finale, this older film gets far more spectacle and shock into its length than films made decades later that could have the gore and perversion, but wasted time on plot padding and a lack of style, whilst this flexes its production muscles spectacularly. Its director Rafael Baledón was a veteran of countless genres - comedy to luchador films - with the advantage he had been an actor too, which allowed him to engage with his casts. He was also a prominent figure in Mexican horror cinema, and it is clear with this film alone he had the right idea of how to treat them in productions style and without losing his audience in dull exposition.

Schizo (1976)/The Comeback (1978)

Director: Pete Walker

Screenplay: David McGillivray [Schizo] / Michael Sloan and Murray Smith [The Comeback]

Cast:

Schizo: Lynne Frederick as Samantha Gray, John Leyton as Alan Falconer, Stephanie Beacham as Beth, John Fraser as Leonard Hawthorne, Jack Watson as William Haskin, Queenie Watts as Mrs Wallace, Trisha Mortimer as Joy, Paul Alexander as Peter McAllister

The Comeback: Jack Jones as Nick Cooper, Pamela Stephenson as Linda Everett, David Doyle as Webster Jones, Bill Owen as Albert B., Sheila Keith as Doris B., Richard Johnson as Macauley, Patrick Brock as Dr. Paulsen, Holly Palance as Gail Cooper

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Never mind symbolic sunshine...it was fucking here!

Immediately from the opening images, Schizo will not be a sensitive take on mental health, not just by the title but even in the opening narration, where even I without a psychology degree am aware schizophrenia and multiple personality disorders are separate concepts. It sets up a lurid thriller bordering on the horror genre, a snapshot not only of this era and how mental illness was depicted in cinema, but a snapshot of old England including the old Co-Op logo on a milk delivery float, or a supermarket with discounted baked beans. It sets up a distinct tone to this premise even if it is indebted to its American or Italian brethren, as we start with an older man incensed about a newspaper about a young "ice princess", ice skater Samantha Gray (Lynne Frederick), about to marry, taking a knife the size of a machete covered in dried blood and bloody pieces of broken glass in his travel case on a mission, to see her in London. One of the clear selling points behind Schizo, central to this, is Lynne Frederick herself. Her career has probably been shadowed by Peter Sellers, the legendary comedian she was married to until his 1980 death, and his own complicated career, whilst her filmography is full of cult films like this or Phase IV (1974).

She does okay in what is a film where the plot twists are obvious, but the lurid spectacle is emphasised, as this is from Pete Walker, a British filmmaker known for being one of the genre filmmakers of the era who made more edgier productions, infamous for films like House of Whipcord (1974) and Frightmare (1974), films which ramped up the gore and sexual content of old pulp genre tropes. He is merely adding to a story which is timeless, as premise wise this story is one you would have gotten in a thirties/forties production from Hollywood or an earlier British shocker. This belongs in the tradition of gristly thrillers which has been updated to the newer decades even if the seventies aesthetic here is charmingly quaint. The film leans into horror genre in terms of the more overt gruesomeness of the murders which begin as Samantha is being stalked, arguably in debt to the Italian giallo, even in terms of the black gloved killer. A subplot about the maid's psychic sessions with her daughter being telepathic feels like a British take on a scene from Deep Red (1975), where a psychic catches wind of the killer telepathically. Admittedly, Dario Argento would have not had a moment talking about the free tea and biscuits for four pence as found in this meeting.

Even when Samantha is stalked, it is obvious what the final twist is, its mental health plot set up with the factors of her family ties being very vague with no one at her wedding reception on her side of the family tree, or how the stalker is set up blatantly from the get-go as a prominent character. Instead, this becomes the tropes shot through its British personality, an intercontinental exchange of plot tropes found in similar films from others countries at the time if with pithier one-liners from characters. Some of the more rewarding scenes are with characters casually having extra marital affairs and even leaving plastic spiders in the soap dish to scare the newlyweds for a joke. The laxness of security for the wedding reception, comical in the modern day for a thriller as someone can casually get away with slipping a bloodied knife by the wedding cake, actually becomes one of the best scenes for casually touching on this sense of personality you only get in British films, less logical but in terms of morbid humour nestled against the ordinary locales. By the time someone can manage surviving being impaled on a bed of spikes, to the point an eyeball is hanging out from a spike going into the head, we are not dealing with a film to take seriously, but charming in its own perverse way as a film from my home country.

The Comeback opens up, coming after Schizo, with a nods to the slasher films whose tropes would be fully codified into the eighties, with a murder scene in the opening that certainly would have been censored for British VHS with a hand graphically lopped off with a scythe, followed by that person's death with the weapon by someone wearing an old woman costume. The film itself, whilst the plot is conventional in set up, is a lot more idiosyncratic than this though. The premise is that of an older American pop star, a former teen idol Nick Cooper (Jack Jones), returning to Britain to record his comeback album, and finding himself staying at a traditional British manor house whilst he is recording the album. Jack Jones himself is an American singer, which is a meta moment of casting I do have to appreciate especially as, befitting how lurid the story becomes, his casting is perverse on purpose for sick humour if you learn a little about him. Jack Jones sang songs like Lollipops and Roses, and the opening theme for the Love Boat American TV series, which makes his casting here, eventually dropping f-bombs and having a sex scene, adding a much more perverse touch to the film knowing that this man with a two time Grammy winner of wholesome music. This was naturally at a time in his recording career where he was doing renditions Little Feat's Dixie Chicken, and a tribute album to the band Bread, so this feels close to the bone of a man who could be like the Nick Cooper character as a star trying for one last grab at success after his sixties pop success.

The grotesqueness of the ex-wife's corpse being left in the old crib after the murder feels apt to the perverse melodrama this turns into, with not as constant need for such shocks as a giallo or a slasher, but with those moments coming when need be. Pete Walker clearly also had access to all the live maggots he could get to depict decay of gruesome corpses just to emphasise that fact. At its heart, this is the updated form of the gothic creepers of yore, where an older singer is effectively being tormented psychologically. It is not just creepy Harry (Peter Turner) who sets the tone, a minor character obsessed with getting Nick's items out of the penthouse, or women's breasts, which he will talk about at length menacingly to a potential love interest of Nick's, a man who makes woollen hats creepy due to osmosis to his personality. No, it is the gothic horror trope of the voices and horrible sights only Nick sees whilst at the manor, the crying and screams from a phantom woman at night, or the current occupants looking after him, "Missus B" (Sheila Keith), an older woman with ominous gravitas to her voice, or her husband who talks of the ancient tree in the garden he tends to screaming due to the carving of a couple's love for each other into the bark, or reading a book on Chinese mythology and Buddhist Hell because he cannot find his tree surgery book.

The plot twist is obvious in hindsight in The Comeback too, but this is a delightfully weird amalgamation of tones. This is a film where the potent red flag of this film having aged like one of the corpses, when a key character is revealed to dress as a woman in the privacy of his own home, is not a red herring even or proof of anything suspicious, but a character beat abruptly placed in the middle of this simple minded shocker of more going on in his mind, the weird sense this genre film with a few more of these turns could have become something even cooler if it had been more unconventional. Both The Comeback and Schizo are conventional, in pace and plotting, which are really the biggest issues with both, but like the best of cases, even weaker genre films as here can have these unexpected turns and delights in them worthy of praise. 

Careful (1992)

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin and George Toles

Cast: Kyle McCulloch as Grigorss, Gosia Dobrowolska as Zenaida, Sarah Neville as Klara, Brent Neale as Johann, Paul Cox as Count Knotkers, Victor Cowie as Herr Trotta, Michael O'Sullivan as The Swan Feeder (Dead Husband of Zenaida), Vince Rimmer as Franz

An Abstract Candidate

 

Guy Maddin with Careful makes a film about a mountain community, a very bleakly humoured take on this setting and context, the Germanic society of Tolzbad a community forced to stay in silence to avoid setting off avalanches. It is a precarious place where it is truly a godsend there are rare valleys nearby whose acoustics silence noises, but one where the problem is significant to the point that flocks of geese are so dangerous they need to be shot out of the sky in the perimeters. The film was also a project whose co-writer George Toles explicitly wanted to tackle incest in Careful¹; the setting allows for a really psychologically twisted work of pent up emotions, contrasted by the lush aesthetic and playfully strange whimsy of this timeless world of the non-existent past. The setting, everyone trapped in this isolated high altitude, has lead to these figures having unlocked memories and desires pent up, including for their own parents or ties to them too tight to the point, suffocating, they will duel their widow mother's suitor to the death.

The tale surrounds the sons of the late Swan Feeder (Michael O'Sullivan), a man who will return as a ghost but stuck with his eyes still blinded, losing one as a babe when his mother pressed him too tightly against a brooch with the pin sticking out, the second warning to any viewer of why you do not stand too close to a cuckoo clock when it hits the hour mark. He will have to watch on, and try to warn anyone he can communicate with, at the two act structure of his lineage's perils, the first following Johann the eldest son (Brent Neale), who wishes to marry Klara (Sarah Neville), but has incestuous dreams about his widowed mother Zenaida (Gosia Dobrowolska). Johann begins the first of the two acts as he succumbs to "mountain illness, meant to be the curse to climb the mountains, which is warned as very dangerous and having claimed many, but is blatant symbolism of the isolation of this extremely closed and emotionally rigid community which wrought neurosis and suppressed desires, especially in a world where the danger of raised voices causing avalanches is a constant. Johann's introductory story shows how edgy Careful has remained, spying on his mother bathing upside down in the chimney, and his downfall where he concocts a sleeping draught before he cracks in guilt violently, in the moment he was to commit a true transgression, leading to the younger third son Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch) to take over the film.

Whilst played with a sick sense of humour, Careful is entirely about the pull of family, one of the most prominent themes of Guy Maddin's filmography, among the many aspects juxtaposing his really eccentric humour against really uncomfortable themes. A lot in his career have had to do with sexuality of all forms and many taboos, which causes his characters over the years to be thrown in melodramatic maelstroms. Grigorss falls for Klara, and inherits Johann's role as the new butler at Count Knotkers' castle, the head of Tolzbad played by Paul Cox, only to learn the truth of Knotkers and his mother's love for each other which was still burning even when she married the Swan Feeder, explaining as well why the oldest brother Franz (Vince Rimmer), who cannot talk and was forced to live in the attic, was stuck ostracised. The connection to family is a theme Guy Maddin has death with even interpreting his own life, or even in a positive way with actress Isabella Rossellini and her legendary filmmaking father Roberto in My Dad Is 100 Years Old (2005); in Careful, be it Count Knotkers having his own deceased mother preserved in a sanitised bedroom, or that Klara has a fixation on her own father, jealous of the closer relationship between him and her sister Glenda as the favourite. Her story even leads to the one scene which may be far more problematic, if unintentionally nowadays, in her going as far as deceive Grigorss with a possible false accusation to kill her father, even if there is a whimsical touch involving using the avalanches to do the job. The irony is that barring the tragic passing of his father at a young age, the short The Dead Father (1985) which began the director's career influenced by this, Maddin's upbringing is sweet and eccentric, even recreating his childhood which showed examples of this in a fantastical form for My Winnipeg (2007), so it might surprise he has twisted tales on family like in Careful.

He definitely likes to probe at neurosis, sexual anxiety and the perverse, which will dabble into anything from the band Sparks providing a musical number in The Forbidden Room (2015) about a man mentally crippled by his interesting in the female posterior, to the purely glorious and fun, making a short Sissy Boy Slap Party (1994) entirely about men wearing very little clothing spanking each other. Guy Maddin's work is not overtly messaged, but the themes are there filtered through obsolete cinematic tropes, least in that his work was seen as throwbacks at this stage or when The Heart of the World (2000), a short inspired by Soviet montage editing, brought more influence in editing and production techniques forward in his work. The fantastical and lyrical is contrasted by the incredibly dark or the purely ridiculous, eccentric behaviour portrayed by characters in these films as much part of their mental tapestries. There is even a whole aspect here in Careful of Johann and Grigorss studying in a butler school, which I cannot help but think of in context to Jakob von Gunten, a 1909 novel written by Swiss novelist Robert Walser which is a very unconventional work, and one we had to wait for animators Stephen and Timothy Quay, in their first theatrical film and with actors, to get an official theatrical adaptation in 1995 with Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life. The connection, even if accidental, is perfect for two works dealing with the unconscious wells of desire.

You could not write a review of a Guy Maddin film without talking of the aesthetic, with the additional fact that with Careful, he was starting to move away from playing tribute to silent cinema aesthetics to others, the look here of old photography hand painted in colour after development, contrasted to the tinted scenes in one colour evoking how silent films used this technique with the colours used depending on the context. Maddin's films are very artificial, even when using old film and TV footage to retell Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo as The Green Fog (2017), Careful having a rustic artificiality with ornate homemade set design, feeling of the 18th century in fact but with details like phonographs existing which effect the sense of time and setting being clearly placed. There is even a deliberate crackle in the soundtrack like an old vinyl which emphasis the sense of this entire being a relic, ironic knowing that the themes I have mentioned of Guy Maddin's, whilst over-the-top, are very real in subject, the hyper exaggerated filmic nature of Careful as if influenced by the plots. The safeguard this artificially created world of Tolzbad becomes allows for Maddin to deal with themes in a way to soften their blow, when he does include some incredibly dark content as talked of in this narrative.

This would be followed by a road bump in his career, with Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) becoming a maligned work, marking Careful and that film as the last of the first era of his career where the editing and production design were not as explicitly part of the texture of his work as later, more staged dramas in their tone in his first act as a director. I view Twilight... as an underrated film, but one which lead to a period of short films, but nothing in terms of theatrical length work until Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (2002). The Heart of the World was a jump start to his career, but also emphasised that, to tell these tales about neurosis, their tactile natures as films included using silent film techniques like intertitles more explicitly, using the editing more, and into the 2010s, Maddin embraced another turn into explicit digital post-production. Careful however marks a point, more overt than his previous films, Archangel (1990) and his first film Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), where one of his most distinct features, melodramas about the traps psychologically and sexually which ensnare usually male leads, became really prominent, and alongside being a great film in its own right in a strong filmography, Careful becomes as important for this reason too for the context.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eccentric/Melodramatic

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

======

1) Interviewed for Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (1997), a Maddin retrospective documentary from this first era of the Canadian filmmaker's career.

Chamber of Horrors (1966)

 

Director: Hy Averback

Screenplay: Stephen Kandel

Cast: Patrick O'Neal as Jason Cravette; Cesare Danova as Anthony Draco; Wilfrid Hyde-White as Harold Blount; Laura Devon as Marie Champlain; Patrice Wymore as Vivian; Suzy Parker as Barbara Dixon; José René Ruiz Martínez (credited as Tun Tun) as Senor Pepe De Reyes; Philip Bourneuf as Insp. Matthew Strudwick

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A failed TV pilot, based on the 1953 House of Wax with Vincent Price, this like many were salvaged for every other which were simply abandoned to be rediscovered online, to recoup the costs of having made them and at least having a final product, especially as like a few pilots over the decades of American television, this is a feature length one meant originally to introduce this premise. Many however were made into TV movies, whilst from Warner Brothers, Chamber of Horrors was re-appropriated into a theatrical film with a William Castle-like gimmick, where at four gruesome moments, a horror warning (with disregard for epilepsy) fires up with a red light flashing and a "horror horn" blaring. This also opens with a great set piece, likely a scene among a few dubbed too gruesome for the TV series to have been created, where the villain Jason Cravette, actor Patrick O'Neal playing up to Vincent Price mannerisms at points, forces a priest at gunpoint to marry him to a female corpse, the cat at the piano watching as he climbs the stairs with his bride in what is, for a sixties Warner Bros. feature, an act of wedding night necrophilia the film portrays within what they could get away with. Unlike the previous Waxworks films, Price's and the film it remade, Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), the wax museum owners here, alongside recreating horrifying murders for their patrons, have a moral too, as a trio of amateur sleuths happy to help the police catch potential subjects of their museum, such as our villain Cravette himself.

One is an expert and craftsman of the wax models, a charming older man played by Wilfrid Hyde-White, whilst the handsome face of the trio, played by Cesare Danova, is the ladies man who will eventually woo another important character later in the second act, a female sex worker played by Laura Devon, and then there is José René Ruiz Martínez/ Tun Tun as Senor Pepe De Reyes. Tun Tun as he was known is playing a character here that, even if he has many jokes about his height, is portrayed by an actor with dwarfism who is able to whip back the perfect one liners and is absolutely charming as their reconnaissance man. They make a legitimately great trio of male characters, actually good ones with distinct personalities, who are brought on the case of Jason Cravette by his own aunt, someone of high privilege who wants him off the street and not strangling debutants when he is not hiring women to dress as brides.

For a former TV pilot, shot on film at the time, it looks good for a period chiller set in the 19th century, one where even if the film is tamer next to others from the time, is gleefully morbid with scenes like severed hands on a tray. Honestly the only thing that has badly aged is a non-Asian actor playing a Chinese merchant for a brief scene, setting up the second act where, after being arrested and escaped the death sentence at a self inflicted cost of a hand, Cravette is provided a collection of new pointy ones including a hook and various blades to start his revenge on those who tried to execute him, with the twisted plan to construct a body from parts of law enforcement who were involved. The horror warning gimmick itself can also be argued to be a pointless inclusion, as alongside the issue of epilepsy with a flashing red light, it neither goes off a few second before the horror moment, but with enough gaps to not work "properly". It is, however, at least, a cherry on top, to what becomes compelling pulp piece which works by itself, if you really want a fully pulpy genre film which gets a lot right.

Chamber of Horrors was a one-off, which could have spawned a film franchise, juggling the suspense and light tone well here. It manages, goreless, to be legitimately creepy in its premise, as quick to capitalise on the case they are on, the wax models by the leads allow this to show the icky case in detail, including of a headless and armless body wrapped in parcel tape like a public art piece. Contrasting this is the whit, Hyde-White in particular a gleefully invested English man, wishing to separate himself from his family back home, happy to run his museum and publish books on strangulation. It is a film that I would be happy to see get a lot more love for as, for an American horror film, this is a good one from a period where, with movements in the genre coming forth from outside the United States to the independent drive-ins especially, you have something like this, despite its origins as a TV pilot for a show that never came to be, you could hold as a nice gem from mainstream Hollywood.

Cruel Jaws (1995)

 

Director: Bruno Mattei

Screenplay: Robert Feen, Bruno Mattei and Linda Morrison

Cast: Richard Dew as Dag Soerensen; David Luther as Francis Berger; George Barnes, Jr. as Samuel Lewis; Scott Silveria as Bob Soerensen; Kristen Urso as Susy Soerensen; Sky Palma as Glenda; Norma J. Nesheim as Vanessa; Gregg Hood as Bill Morrison; Carter Collins as Ronnie Lewis; Natasha Etzer as Gloria Lewis; Larry Zience as Larry; Jay Colligan as Tommy

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Cruel Jaws is talked of in the documentary Sharksploitation (2023), about the lineage of shark movies before and especially after the cultural shockwave of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), as truly one of the most infamous ones, probably with Shark Attack 3: Megalodon (2002) right behind, if only for a final line to rival Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) for iconic memorability. Bruno Mattei was a man behind mondo films, a shameless and proud reinterpretation of Aliens (1986) named Shocking Dark (1989), infamous titles like Hell of the Living Dead (1980), and buddies with Claudio Fragasso of Troll 2 (1990), and he will at least have a place in my heart for a film like Zombi 3 (1988), the Lucio Fulci film he and Fragasso helped on when Fulci fell ill mid-production, which I have unapologetically fallen for as late era Italian cheese. Here with Crawl Jaws, long past the golden era of Italian genre cinema, infamously the film “borrowed” footage from other Italian Jaws rip-offs, including Enzo G. Castellari‘s The Last Shark (1981), but even from the Jaws franchise. This, for a complete lack of politely language, gleeful waved its dick precariously close to fire of copyright as a result of this, such much so that, when Shout Factory in the United States attempted to license the film for physical media release in 2017, on a double bill with post-apocalypse film Exterminators of the Year 3000 (1983), they decided to just release the later film by itself¹ due to these copyright issues. It makes it amazing now, with hindsight, that for our United American friends the film managed to be finally cleared by Severin Films in 2020². This is more so as there was even music from the the Star Wars franchise, or even in the version you can see so close it suggested the shark would fly in like a Tie-Fighter at one point.

They also provided the “Snyder” Cut, a joke which has actually aged faster than the film, as factoring in how Italian producers and filmmakers did try to sell their films as if they were American productions, Mattei took the pseudonym of “William Snyder” for this production. By the time Severin Films got the license, they were banking on a trend in that year over an online campaign to release Zack Snyder's original cut of the DC comic book adaptation of Justice League (2017), the four plus hour re-cut from 2021 its own subject to unpack, but now the most esoteric thing of this weird movie which has enough already to consider, including the fact that “Snyder Cut” joke on the promotion connects to them having access to the Japanese release cut for that release with more gore. As well with these films, co-productions and/or alternative releases of films existed, this presenting the dichotomy with Cruel Jaws that, in most scenes, this would be the Jaws rip-off you could show on Sunday afternoon television, family friendly enough were it not for the gore that occasionally appears, but could not be shown because of the amount of swearing and bizarre (and lurid) sex comedy dialogue you get throughout this schismed curiosity.

Premise wise, this is Jaws, as for those who do not know that film, it is about a shark, unlike those in real life, who deliberately goes out of its way to terrorise and attack humans off Amity Island, which repeats here with a shark in Florida. The major is happy ignore warnings from his police about these attacks so the windsailing regatta stays open, these shark and Jaws rip-offs, even those about killer animals on land, emphasising a distrust on small governmental officials’ ability to protect their citizens even if unintentionally, whilst Cruel Jaws also includes a subplot of a corrupt real estate figure trying to bulldoze an aquarium ran by Dag Soerensen (Richard Dew) to put a hotel there. Also infamously Richard Dew looks like he took hair and moustache tips from controversial pro wrestler Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea, which is more befitting as Dew was his stand-in for two films, two TV movies called Assault on Devil's Island (1997) and Assault on Death Mountain (1999).

Imagining Richard Dew attempting to body slam the shark aside, and whether a leg drop on it would still work into water, is contrasted by the fact that, as this film continues on as a a conventional shark film in premise, playing to Jaws’ plot points as slasher films had their own tropes, he is as much part of the tonal schism too as you have a subplot about his character and his disabled daughter, a cute moppet in a wheelchair, and their trained aquatic animals for their shows, two dolphins but especially the seal, who do come from a cute animal film where they need to save the aquarium by paying the evil businessman's rent through a reward, in another film by a competition, here eventually killing a deadly shark. This is however contrasted by a film where you also have a lot of cursing, lewd comments and a dose of scuzzier teen sex comedy language with some garbled attempts at one liners, like the guy part of the villains who, with apologies to female readers for having to quote this, thinks saying he is a “pussy inspector” needing to do his job is a good pick-up line for three women on the beach.

For most its length, even with some of the more gristly moments, mostly some blood and the chewed up remains of victims, this would have been PG-13 to use the American ratings system, but the script with Bruno Mattei co-writing too completely tips the scales in a peculiar direction, from the constant use of the word “fuck”, an obsession with balls and uncalled for use of fat shaming, even to a truly evil villain, with “shit” for emphasis, really undercutting the tone in what is neither fish nor fowl in tone. This is contrasted by how Cruel Jaws as a film is pretty conventional, and even its notorious use of other films’ footage will not stand out if you were to shrug your shoulders at it. The thing which stands out is its strange tonal choices in dialogue and mood. This is matched by how misanthropic this feels despite its happy ending: were it not enough his father is an evil stereotypical businessman with shady mob connections, leading to two thugs straight out of an Andy Sidaris film appear to try to get the shark, your villain's son does a family film crime of trying to poison one of the hero’s dolphins with poisoned fish, his cronies are obnoxious teens, and even another of the lead’s girlfriends, dating a marine biologist, become completely unsympathetic by rejecting his obsession, going out for a fling cold-hearted with villainous dolphin poisoning son, than everyone forget this and for her to be eaten by said shark.

There is also a sense of this mocking US culture, the idea of a resort town where the mayor and businesses will ignore the potential shark related casualties writing itself as satire if borrowed from Jaws, but one of the legitimately successful scenes of the film is where an Australian/British family, with kids, have come to the place hoping to see a shark eat a person alive. Most of Cruel Jaws is not this, a film which feels apt for the director of films I have enjoyed like Rats: Night of Terror (1984), but I will say that, for a large percentage of this, Cruel Jaws is entirely what it says, a slightly lopsided Jaws. It has a lot of lines of dialogue, unintentionally, which stick out, and it is strange to witness, but also you can see, if you are not on its wavelength, or a fanatic of these films, including the people who made the Sharksploitation documentary, that this will just cause people to scratch their heads in curiosity in what on earth the point this was attempting. Bruno Mattei would chug along, still making films even by the time of his passing in 2007, if just before the likes of Sharknado (2013) came to be; despite the fact Cruel Jaws is shambolic in many ways, I kind of wished he was able to have made another one of these, having to use CGI than footage from other shark films, and seen what madness he would bring to life, preferably with the fuller balls-to-the-walls attitude of his eighties films than this.

 

=====

1) Cruel Jaws - Blu-ray Release Cancelled, written by Das Wiesel for Movie Censorship.com, and published on December 14th 2014.

2) Severin Films Releases CRUEL JAWS, MASSACRE IN DINOSAUR VALLEY, AND PRIMITIVES Today!, written by "The Vault Master" for The B-Movie News Vault, and published September 29th 2020.

The Child (1977)

 

Director: Robert Voskanian

Screenplay: Ralph Lucas

Cast: Laurel Barnett as Alicianne Del Mar; Rosalie Cole as Rosalie Nordon; Frank Janson as Nordon; Richard Hanners as Len Nordon; Ruth Ballan as Mrs. WhitfieldChris Tieken as Jefferson

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

In my idealised view, the girl at the start of The Child is not sacrificing a cat to the dead at the graveyard, but that the undead merely want a kitten to pet. Kidding aside, as it is clear later on animals are being eaten by the occupants of this cemetery, the scene is an appropriately odd introduction for a film I underrated in quality and in terms of oddness. There is something compelling from the get-go, and already established from the first scene, very suspicious things are transpiring at Osbourne, California, the birth place of our lead Alicianne Del Mar (Laurel Barnett) she returns to as part of a job as a nanny for a young girl named Rosalie (Rosalie Cole), the same one to be seen in the first sequence with the cat. Alicianne finds herself introduced having driven off the road and briefly ending up at a boarding house where it is claimed Rosalie was the cause for all the boarders being scared away, a warning bell never heard as everything in the nearby woods is apparently haunted and is at least populated by sinister figures with sharp nails.

The initial set up are tropes of the horror genre, but all entice, as the Rosalie family is male barring her, the mother deceased and thus leaving the father and older brother. Rosalie herself fits the sinister child mould even without clear psychic powers, capricious and vindictive, out for revenge for those who slighted her mother, and liable to set off on anyone else including her family is desired. Considering she and her father will gleefully laugh at the dinner table about boy scouts accidentally poisoning themselves, the tale is already twisted before it becomes clear Alicianne is in peril.

The Child is a curiosity which I came to as being more conventional than I had realised among a set of regional North American horror films I was binging; returning to it, it turned out with hindsight to be far more unconventional than remembered. With a curious (and great) set of piano pieces with electronic samples by Rob Wallace to match, who would go on to score educational games based on Nintendo's Mario video game mascot of all things like Mario Is Missing! (1992), The Child is slow burn pulp. It is still lurid, violence and meant as scary, but the film becomes moody instead as a result. It guts a lot of unnecessary exposition as well which, whilst there is not too much to say about The Child without spoiling it, proves to be its virtue in not feeling bogged down, focusing on taking well worn troupes and making them unconventional in context. Even when it becomes more conventional by the ending, when you are following characters fleeing ghouls, there is both the surprisingly transgressive conclusion for one character, but also that for the time before The Child has the mood of a dream too. There is a lot of eye catching imagery here for what is many tropes from this genre - be it the sinister Jack-o'-lantern moving by itself, or a scarecrow helping with revenge with a rifle or a bloody teddy bear - which goes to show with hindsight I had underappreciated this film greatly when it had more to offer.