Darkside Blues (1994)

 

Director: Nobuyasu Furukawa

Screenplay: Mayori Sekijima

Based on the manga by Hideyuki Kikuchi and Yuho Ashibe

(Voice) Cast: Akio Ohtsuka as Kenzou; Hideyuki Hori as Gren; Kotono Mitsuishi as Mai; Kouichi Yamadera as Enji; Masako Katsuki as Tamaki; Maya Okamoto as Selia; Natsuki Sakan as Darkside; Nozomu Sasaki as Katari; Shinichiro Miki as Chris; Yasunori Matsumoto as Tatsuyairector: Viðar Víkingsson

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

 

Darkside Blues isn’t really horror, though it has plenty of supernatural and Gothic touches worthy of the season, and I am glad to have revisited this, as this is a fascinating genre hybrid between dystopian sci-fi about corrupt corporations, which is still salient as a theme, that however has magic exist as well as a titular figure who rides around on a horse drawn carriage which can fly. It is fascinating, even with less than ninety minutes to try to depict this world, and a source manga which did not last long enough either to expand it further, to see what interesting things this depicts, be it a titular figure who acts more like a supernaturally powered advisor for freedom fighters to the sight of someone being tortured by being turned to gold whilst alive with alchemy. From the same author of Vampire Hunter D, and the infamous Wicked City as per its own animated adaptation, you see the threads for those here too, but in this melancholic and fascinating one-off.

 

For the full review, follow the link HERE.

Bangkok Haunted (2001)

Director: Oxide Pang and Pisut Praesangeam

Screenplay: Pisut Praesangeam and Sompop Wetchapipat

Cast: Pimsiree Pimsee as Paga / Jieb, Dawan Singha-Wee as Pan, Kalyanut Sriboonrueng as Kanya, Pete Thongchua as Nop

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A horror anthology from Thailand, Bangkok Haunted however does something very different in not having the wraparound start the feature, but immediately lunging into the first of three stories, so let us begin as such too. An ancient drum, for the first story, is being transferred in a truck. It is established to have a ghost woman haunting the instrument as the man watching the items in the back is more concerned of leaping out at speed onto the road to get away. The young woman that receives this drum, Jieb (Pimsiree Pimsee), is going to have to deal with the haunted consequences.

We see the drum's origins in 1917, as it is connected to an adopted girl whose parents died of sickness and whose adoptive father is a scholar of music. Raised to become a dancer, Paga (also played Pimsee) befriends another child, a disfigured and ostracised one, who when they become adults is infatuated with her despite Paga only views him as a brother whilst loving another man. This is the most conventional of the three stories in plotting, yet allowed enough space to breathe as Jieb in the modern day with an older male scholar, wandering into flashbacks in the past within her dreams without warning, realise something is amiss with the drum and research its past. It seems like a critique, for a forty four minute segment, that I will not write a lot about this segment beyond this, but it starts with a sound opening for the entire project by co-director Oxide Pang. Oxide Pang with his twin brother Danny came into prominence by the 2000s for films that caught the "Tartan Asian Extreme" wave of interest in the West for Asian genre cinema. Born in Hong Kong, they have juggled genres, action with Bangkok Dangerous (1999) and its 2008 remake with Nicolas Cage, alongside the original 2002 version of The Eye, a horror film about a woman who sees ghosts as a blind woman who was given her sight back through a donor's set of eyes. Their work outside the director's chair deserves credit too as Danny Pang was the editor on the Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002-3), the first one of the many films from the East which caught on fire with interest for Western film fans. They have worked together as brothers but also separately, Oxide Pang making this film instead with Pisut Praesangeam, a Thai filmmaker/producer/screenwriter in the latter's home country, setting this anthology within Bangkok.

The first segment is the pair's most traditional anthology story in tone, one which does provide an appropriately macabre twist - [Spoiler Warning] one of Paga's arms was inside the drum and we learn how it got there [Spoilers End] - and feels the perfect length for its micro-feature tone by itself. After this, Bangkok Haunted's stories are more idiosyncratic in their structures. Probably the biggest virtue, for a film for whatever inexplicable reason I hated when I first saw it, likely due to its slow burn pace, is that all three segments are distinct. Even if the next two as tales entirely set in the modern urban landscape of Bangkok, those two managed to stand out from each other in tone, and since the entire feature is over two hours long and lets them all feel like micro-features, there is no sense of rushing plot points or losing their individual moods either. The wraparound, whilst with a spooky gotcha in the final shot, is not really a story but I still liked it, especially as it feels more like a nice wrapping that does not need to have a dynamic build. It is a curveball when that, only after a forty four minute tale, we have it established three female friends are telling scary stories in a cafe, with them critiquing plot logic or trying to figure out cool titles for each other's stories. It is actually a cool twist on the horror anthology tone to not have a twist, just a trio of interesting story tellers who are friends and engaging with each other.

Story two could be said to be too convoluted and weird for its own good, but it is weird for me as much in a good way. The mature tale of the three, with its explicit nudity and grotesqueness, it is about an essence called Phy Essence. The segment is almost out of order in explaining the plot details, which is why it could be extremely confusing, but as for our female lead, the Phy Essence is a love potion which you can buy hush hush, here in a funny moment in a sex shop where a male customer complains the porn tape he has rented is too damaged at the best parts. The essence is seen once slipped into a man's drink, but is a McGuffin, not really explained but designed to make men fall inescapably in love with the woman who uses it.

The essence, as established in the first scene in a hospital morgue with necrophilia overtones, is collected by one guy who finds recently dead and beautiful female corpses, and is made from the blood collected from their slit open necks. It is a task he secretly gets on with even if he is in danger of being caught, or finds a male colleague getting drunk on the shift and sleeping under a blanket on one of the gurneys among the corpses. That we see the corpses occasionally open their eyes or move their hands suggests that the Phy Essence has ill advised magical aspects too, more so as there is a ghost woman looming about, and that with one of the male suitors, you see the harmful effects of the essence. Not only does he effectively sleep with both a living and dead woman at the same time on a one night stand, but ends up first puking up for the initial symptoms, only to be at death's door with a Buddhist priest trying to help him. Another will be killed by a car and immediately come back as a ghost due to the essence, and it is clear the magic behind it has dangerous properties alongside the gristly nature of the concoction just making the dead angry and come back to haunt those involved in using it.

It is a very idiosyncratic story, probably more vague then it itself realises, very erotic and sexually explicit in a way that it is quite striking with time passing, be it the humour of the lead living next door to a couple in an apartment who are too loud in their passions, or the necrophilia aspects at the morgue. We had some transgressive films from this early 2000s wave that dealt with sexuality - like Takeshi Miike from Japan and the late Kim Ki-duk from South Korea, the later sadly someone we have to put a caveat around due to sexual misconduct allegations - but sexuality was not really as prominent in this era of violence, of action and genre films which did not really tackle those subjects, or the trend for ghost stories influenced from Asian filmmakers modernising them, only to get remade as American films that same decade. You can make the argument this is erotic for the sake of titillation, not for profoundness, but at the same time, you also have a story where despite this women are central to the plot, which is striking within itself. It is effectively a moral tale of women stuck in the position of needing the Phy Essence, because they feel they need to go out into night clubs for men to date, with the essence whose gift is too dangerous. It is a tale when even men who die from its effect become ghosts too, leading to a haunting here where those made to love a woman will do so even if, in one of the best shots of the whole film, they live together in physical embrace after her death in the same grave. With its very electronic, New Age tinged music, it has for all its all-over-the-place plotting a distinct tone that I appreciated, effectively a cousin to a segment for the Three Extremes (2004) anthology, which was expanded into a 2004 feature film by itself, a work directed by Hong Kong director Fruit Chan called Dumplings. Three... Extremes leant into the growing interest in Asian cinema at the time with three directors from three different countries - Fruit Chan from Hong Kong and known for films like Made in Hong Kong (1997), Takashi Miike from Japan, and one of the biggest figures to gain prominent and his career grown from this trend, Park-Chan Wook from South Korea. Dumplings itself in either its versions was explicitly about the theme I feel the Phy Essence is about, the idea of women forced to follow gendered conventions, in that case to stay youthful in a world when men's eyes wander to younger women, through the very twisted concept of Chinese dumplings made with human foetuses. Whilst Bangkok Haunted's own tale of ill advised love charms is stranger, they make a fascinating pair on the cursed love remedies from the perspectives of women if you have a strong stomach for one of the pair mentioned.

Story three begins with a scene of a crime, where a woman has hung herself in a warehouse. The police office on the case suspects it was not a suicide but a murder, believing there was no way for her to get up to where she was found alongside evidence of a struggle beforehand. Whilst the police chief refuses to press on with this idea, he investigates on his own terms, and the coroner cements his concerns when there are suspicious clues complicating her death. This is interesting as a crime mystery steeped in the supernatural; when a scene transpires when a random couple following him swear they saw a woman trying to get out of the moving vehicle, it is clear he is now haunted by her too. All three stories involve ghostly women wronged, and that really becomes apparent for this tale of a horrible series of circumstances for its one innocent, the woman herself.

Whilst in dire need of a high definition re-release, it is by this segment I came to appreciate Bangkok Haunted's general washed out and dingy aesthetic with moments of subtle colour. Even though one of the tales is partially set in 1917, with significantly more colour in the forest locations, this film really emphasises the idea of the back alleys and dark night streets of Bangkok throughout itself. With there being a second scene in this segment within a sex shop, as the lead makes enquiries on the woman leading to her husband, it is very atmospheric in imagining these ghosts drifting among the living in these cramped environments, the places not seen as idyllic and grungy but the real world for normal people stuck in crammed apartments trying to find ways to get on in life. They are not disconnected from the living either, which makes this aesthetic more appropriate, as it leads to suspicion of domestic abuse from her husband, seemingly changed and wheelchair bound from a car crash. The key to the segment from here is a series of red herrings, including a male lover of hers who is a boss at a construction site, where the many men in her life are not good people. This includes the lead himself who is revealed to have been part of it too. There is a sick humour as more people are revealed to be innocent when information is learnt when it is too late, including unfortunate deaths of suspects, and one of the best turns when someone's innocence is proven but through his involvement for another crime of political corruption. One twist comes fully from a murder mystery pot boiler - [Huge Spoiler] with the help of ice to be able to reach a hanging spot [Spoilers End] - and ultimately not even our white knight lead is a good man, just finding excuses to purge his own guilt from the things he did to the woman.

The story has many trigger warnings as already brought up and also revealed, including a deliberate miscarriage with a coat hanger that is not comfortable to witness without being tasteless. They lead to this being the saddest tale of the three about a woman who did not deserve her lot, whose affairs were clearly to escape her misery, and whose fate leaves her a ghost watching those involved discover their own complicity and fall off the rails. It is a perfect conclusion to a trio of stories I unfairly dismissed in my youth, and I have absolute respect for the entire project, with three strong entries, being a very good horror anthology which took risks, be it telling a traditional ghost story, being very weird and sexual, and for this one to actually force one to sympathise for its female lead in its uncomfortable nods to how bad human beings can be to each other.

Darna Mana Hai (2003)

 

Director: Prawaal Raman

Screenplay: Atul Sabharwal, Rajnish Thakur and Abbas Tyrewala

Cast: Nana Patekar as John Rodriguez, Saif Ali Khan as Anil Manchandani, Vivek Oberoi as Amar Vashisht, Sanjay Kapoor as Sanjay Joshi, Sohail Khan as Karan Ahuja, Shilpa Shetty as Gayatri Pandit, Isha Koppikar as Abhilasha Malhotra, Aftab Shivdasani as Purav Khandelwal, Boman Irani as the hotel owner, Sameera Reddy as Shruti Kapoor, Gaurav Kapoor as Romi Yadav, Antara Mali as Anjali Deshmukh, Raghuvir Yadav as Dayashankar Pandey, Anuj Pandit Sharma as Varun Goswami, Rajpal Yadav as the apple vendor, Sushant Singh as the serial killer, Malavika as Neha Bhatia, Rahul Singh as Dev Bohra, Peeya Rai Chowdhary as Mehnaz, Kiku Sharda as Amar Varma, Yusuf Hussain as Mr. Khandelwal

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A Bollywood horror anthology, there were songs made about the stories within this production and a soundtrack release for this film, but they were left out as bonus features included on the DVD I viewed this through. Whilst I will be very positive about this film in general, thankfully the opening credits by themselves compensated for this and are adore as this film’s own idiosyncratic creative choice for this genre. That being, after a shot of black gore seeping over a blood red apple, a Eurodrance influenced song kicks in. Female dancers in black body suits dance against a red background, with motifs of all the story segments included, whilst the male singer croons the morbid ditty which is the central song. This is not something you would have gotten in a Amicus anthology from the seventies, but here is was a great way to establish its personality, follow the tradition of the subgenre by opening with the wraparound story first that will weave between all the other tales.

A group of college students, alongside one named Vikas with his apple cutting knife looking like he is about to snap at any minute, are driving in the middle of the night until a flat tire leaves them stuck in the jungle. Whilst there are some aged fat shaming at one of the men, who is not even that large physically, thankfully it sets them up stuck at an abandoned old house in the middle of the night whilst trying to find a phone. An improvised game of cricket or a sing-along of Hindi film songs are rejected for telling stories to each other, critiquing them in each cut back to the main cast as a secret figure is picking each one off as each story-within-a-story plays out. The first story is arguably the most conventional, and you need to think of it as more a starter before the main course, about a couple on their honeymoon driving at night. Their car also breaks, and the husband vanishes checking the engine to his wife’s horror. It is the shortest tale, with someone sinking into a bog and a doppelganger, with stab wound sound jump scares. Whilst an obvious one, it is a nice beginning tale to an anthology which gets insanely interesting immediately afterwards and never lost my interest from this point onwards.

The second story is of Anil, another taste of the perils of driving in the middle of nowhere, in this case reaching a hotel. This leads to a fascinating turn as it is about the least expected thing, Anil as a smoker who has ended up at a non-smoking hotel, one ran by a man who loves old Tom & Jerry cartoons and hates smoking, so much so he locks the entrance door and says at gun point he can cure Anil of his bad habit if he stays for six months. Here we have a bleak comedy about a man, forcing Amil to stay, with a seventy per cent success rate in his patients giving up, the other thirty per cent in the basement in plastic body bags. It is such a good, gleefully morbid tale to have, not what you would expect traditionally for a horror story.

The third story is just as good, about a male school teacher, a strict one who punishes the same young girl for forgetting her homework all the time. That is until she finally does, and then the guilt kicks in and spirals out of control. There is more to this, a guilt from pushing a school classmate to his death off a roof, who has seemingly possessed her, but even that plays to that sense of guilt over this poor girl in general. Using very stylish choices of editing and fast forward montage to ramp up this mood, this is a really interesting juggle of its central twist and this theme of the cruelness of a teacher. With “Aum” found on each page of her work, the sigh to him his school friend is involved from the grave, it is as much a psychological tale with a  sick sense of awkward humour as he is the one unraveling, even calling her mother to talk about doing her homework. Or even visiting the home at night to see of how she does the homework, disturbing the mother especially as his least conventional attempt at home intrusion is misinterpreted as nefarious threat on a small child. Even if supernatural as a tale, it is a well told tale with madness as the punishment which also works fully.

The fourth story is about a housewife and a sinister apple merchant, which is the strangest story of them all if the one with arguably the most macabre interpretation, as any who eats his apples, like her cricket loving husband, turns into an apple themselves. There is not a lot more to say than this, barring that this is fun and actually quite disturbing. It brings a new perspective on the Golden Delicious depending on what the merchant does with the new produce. The fifth story is more sobered, another man driving at night who picks up a hitchhiker in a churchyard. As Creedence Clearwater Revival’s version of Good Golly Miss Molly plays on the car radio, the hitchhiker says he has lost his wife ten days earlier, though he is the one who died. There are more twists to this nice little piece, turning between drama and humour, like the preferred term of “spirit” over “ghost” or one twist involving a hidden camera prank, making it a success.

The final main story is also a success, a guy doomed to be on the bottom of life at a college named Purab. That is until he finds a sacred statue in the hills he rants at for his lot in life, and gains the ability to stop time. Power immediately corrupts, and whilst there is a gross hint of what he could do, particularly with a woman he is attracted to at college when he briefly freezes her, but it is thankfully dealt with as wrong as it should be, with most of the story a naïve sense of true evil, thinking he can instead show her how he can stop the world without doing so to her to convince her to love him instead, whilst getting petty revenge on his domineering father and planning the crimes he could get up to. Gaining more and more megalomaniac tendencies, the punch line involves the danger of posing in front of mirrors that cements a strong series of segments. Arguably with the exception of the first, which still works as an introduction, it is one of the strongest anthologies I have seen in terms of consistency.

The wraparound itself is strong as well, as it effectively becomes a slasher film ending involving a killer who hates fear. It even ends on a melancholic note for everyone involved, even for the killer. The result is a very strong anthology altogether, with zero expectations going to this barring optimism. Even the pre-film DVD ads stood out as a fresh remainder, with hindsight, as a complete outsider to Bollywood cinema that I wish to actually dig up more films like this and for more of them to be readily available in terms of the later Blu-Ray era as much as streaming. By the time this film was first release we are already at the point this film’s distributor, Eros International, was celebrating twenty five years of distributing Bollywood films globally. They were still releasing VHS and V-CD releases, but also were also providing online and satellite broadcasting, even providing their own online DVD rental system on their website. It is a tangent, but considering all the very positive things I have said about Darna Mana Hai, and that it is the kind of horror anthology that a lot of people would really dig, the fact that this is a film you do not find on Blu Ray and not licensed from a distributor, when back in the day Eros International were doing their damndest to distribute an entire country’s cinema, speaks a bit from an outsider’s annoyance. That Bollywood is still something, whilst with its own huge audience, felt too separated even if as much my own ignorance is as much to blame too. That is not even taking into consideration this was the debut film for its director Prawaal Raman, which has to be praised for his first film being a really solid horror anthology alongside everyone else on the production.  

Visible Secret (2001)

 

Director: Ann Hui

Screenplay: Abe Kwong

Cast: Eason Chan as Peter Wong Choi, Man Kin-fung as young Peter, Shu Qi as June / Wong Siu-kam, Kelly Moo as young June, Anthony Wong as Wong-lin, Sam Lee as Simon, James Wong as Lo Kit, Wayne Lai as Peter's brother, Kara Hui as Siu-kam's mother

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

As a young girl, June (Shu Qi) saw a man is decapitated on rail lines, played by Anthony Wong, and whilst everyone was horrified by the body briefly wandering about headless, she learnt she could see ghosts when she found his head. Just because you can see ghosts however does not mean June has other problems to deal with, like ex-boyfriends, let alone when the karaoke room she wishes to use is haunted. A horror comedy, but with an emotional edge, it is noticeably by Ann Hui, an acclaimed female director whose career was sadly not that wildly available in the United Kingdom considering how well regarded she already was by this film in her long career. Behind such films like Boat People (1982), a sombre drama part of her acclaimed set of films about displaced Vietnamese refugees, she is also evidence of how Hong Kong filmmakers have developed the ability to switch genres with ease. Some legends found niches - John Woo with the heroic bloodshed genre, Wong Kar-Wai with doomed romances - but even those two examples changed tact and even genres occasionally in their careers too. In the case of Visible Secret, Hui is behind the camera for many dramas in her career, but has also made action films, comedies, and already had a film about people being able to see ghosts decades before called The Spooky Bunch (1980). By itself, it is noticeable how Visible Secret feels of its own in terms of mood and tone within a new decade.

You can see that, for a comedy, it plays with a sense of quiet emotion only to puncture it with moments of slapstick, ghoulish humour and bleak humour, where soon-to-be-fired hairdresser Peter (Eason Chan) encounters June during a one night stand together and find them entangled in each others' lives. Emotions are interrupted by how he lost his job, though the boy finds it cool to see blood even if it is his own, or the likes of one's uncle, meant to be in an old folk's home, appearing covered in red paint claiming to be attacked by ghosts and trying to bite someone's nose off. The possession of a single mother by two ghosts, arguing over the body within a spectacle of physical comedy for one of the film's stand out sequences, is contrasted by the sad final discovery after that sequence, and that tonal shifting by screenwriter Abe Kwong plays a huge part to the entire production. The drama is there, and many scenes this absurd humour is contrasted with sudden emotion, as Peter finds himself encountering the world of the supernatural, both learning too late people he has crossed paths with are already dead, or struggling through those many possessions and hauntings he encounters with June by his side. As the pair of slowly falling in love, June herself is not exactly as comfortable with her gift either, able to see the dead through one eye. Shu Qi stands out just in terms of her gothic appearance as the character, and the playfully flighty attitude June has at her happiest, but she also plays a young woman struggling with the sights in general, and is very captivating as the awkward co-lead with Eason Chan.

The world they exist in is also very distinct in terms of aesthetic. Of the early 2000s, with its digital effects and visual look, the film has an appropriately washed out mood to its urban landscapes. Colour is here, vibrant still, but within a Hong Kong city that feels stepped in melancholia and alienated young adults, it feels apt that among its docks and markets there are all the ghosts wandering about with all their stories. Random possession by a female ghost in a toilet, who committed suicide due to being jilted by a lover, makes sense with matter-of-factness in context to this world. Even when it has the least excepted reference to a Toblerone I was expecting to see, which would be unintentionally funny in another context as a Swiss chocolate popular in my home land, that is brought up in a deeply emotional meeting between son and his father that, seen twice in two different ways, is one of the scenes with the most heart in both versions. The comedic tone at times throughout Visible Secrets is clearly being used to emphasis the dramatic weight of its themes of loss and mourning.

In a world of muted green and blue lighting, the obvious theme for a story like this, with the ghosts when they possess people, is all the emotions and rage they dealt with in their lives they cannot get rid of. This is especially in mind to two of them being women spurned by men and heartbroken, and Antony Wong's character, whilst not returning in the full flesh, being a prologue figure important to the latter act but whose gruesome demise is entirely a bad luck of the draw in how it transpired. There is even a charlatan exorcist who finds himself embraced in June's case despite his open scepticism to his work, which just emphasises the tone and mood perfectly of the entire film, where the supernatural passe
s the weird lives of the living like ships passing in the night.

There is the one aspect of the film which may divide viewers thought, and that is the twist ending. To spoil two films at once - [Huge Spoilers] this is the same twist The Sixth Sense (1999) by M. Night Shyamalan had [Spoilers End]. It is on one hand a huge emotional gut punch, if one which has the potential to a) add a greater weight to scenes when revisited in terms of how characters interact, or b) just cause a tangled and confusing mess to rationalise it all. Taking it for what it is, then worry about this, it is the last dose of melancholia, emphasising the humour in Visible Secrets, even its scares, were always taking the backseat to the emotional drive of the film. It is for that reason, if with a caveat depending on the individual viewer's reaction to that twist, mine to the entire production was an admiration of Ann Hui's film in its entirety.  

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.

The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe (1974)

 

Director: José Mojica Marins

Screenplay: José Mojica Marins, Adriano Stuart and Rubens Francisco Luchetti

Cast: José Mojica Marins as himself/Coffin Joe, Alcione Mazzeo as Luciana, Ariane Arantes as Wilma, Geórgia Gomide as Lúcia, Joffre Soares as Júlio, Marcelo Picchi as Carlos, Marisol Marins as Betinha, Walter Stuart as Álvaro, Wanda Kosmo as Malvina

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

José Mojica Marins and his creation Coffin Joe, who came to be in cinema with At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1964), has been appreciated and preserved, both when Marins was still with us and after his 2020 passing. We are still missing one or two films however in his filmography, and one of the most prominent absentees is The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe, which you would naturally presume would be a part of the Coffin Joe catalogue with all the others as, even if appearing in the end only, that character is central to its biggest selling point. If you are a fan of this character, then the set up for this is a tantalising one of Marins and Coffin Joe crossing paths. Marins as himself is first shown directing on a film set a home invasion going amiss for the robbers when they did not expect the young couple their targeted to become elderly ghouls, and calmly taking an interview in a nice green jumper and with even his trademark long fingers nails on display. This is his other film metatextuality poking at his legendary creation, if a pulpier crossover between creator and creation, less dealing with the character in the real world but imagining himself being terrorised by his own creation.

The first film which tackled this, Awakening of the Beast (1970), was a really metatextual production because Marins was tackling the growing notoriety around the Coffin Joe character in terms of backlash. That film is arguably more difficult to appreciate if you have not seen another film of his, as it is a commentary on the controversy over his morbid character and the success he was having in popular culture in Brazil. However, especially when it turns into a full colour wig-out with buttock faced creatures in Hell, it became more readily available outside his homeland and paradoxically a more sellable film for how bizarre it is even with context. Bloody Exorcism does get to the risqué content by the time of the Satanist cult torturing people in Hell in the final act, but this is a straightforward genre film. A lashing of haunted house/witch's curse premise is fleshed into this, all in setting up the meeting between Marins as himself and Coffin Joe as the ultimate antagonist against his own creation. There is moments where he gets to portray himself as a very intelligent man, who gets to comment with other characters about his beliefs on how horror works and is liked as it is, but he himself is not going to dissect his evil creation as a construction as Awakening of the Beast did, but have Coffin Joe scaring him instead.

José Mojica Marins is the director-creator going to an island where a friend lives with his family, all with the intention to plan his next script only to become embroiled with an evil aura terrorising the family. To his credit, the opening has an appropriately sombre opening of him travelling to the location by boat, set to haunting chanting in the score. This is also set at Christmas, with adds an amusing touch as things will start to turn amiss as soon as he gets there. First it seems merely mischievous, like a chair moving by its own will, then starts to become more an issue when the grandfather becomes the first person to get possessed, and it is established everything is (literally) going to Hell. It is cool to see Marins, whose films have been as much sold for their transgressive and blasphemous content over the years play with more traditional horror tropes. As much of the reason that he became as controversial as he was as a horror creator was that Coffin Joe the character is an atheist who thumbed his nose at religion and morality, and believed in finding the perfect women to breed the perfect offspring by any means necessary, even murder. This has Coffin Joe as a literal evil near the end that our protagonist, and has the director/co-writer take a shot for the first half of Bloody Exorcism at the classic horror tropes of haunted houses and curses, where even a toy piano being played by itself is ominous as is Marins himself being assaulted by flying books. Not even the Christmas tree is safe from snakes briefly materialising from it.

Though that side will appear later on, it may disappoint some expecting him to have the extremes that made him a controversial figure at this time do not really appear as prominently here, where there is the cute moppet daughter and Marins' film is entirely on the side on the good nuclear family, but it is interesting to see him go through this plot thread. Connected to an angry witch terrorising the family who he has wandered into the drama of, all because the wife requested her help to be able to conceive a daughter on condition the witch choose who she would marry as an adult, each member of the family becomes possessed, and sadly even the family dog is not safe, all whilst Jose is trying to rationalise the scenario. I wonder if The Exorcist (1973) came to influence this or not, or even got to Brazil at that specific time to even be able to do so, its slower pace and gleefully eerie tone suggesting this as initially a "safer" if still fun Marins film. The score certainly helps, and eventually the tone shifts into more extreme content.

By that point, there is nude possession with inappropriate self use of a poker and Marins in a lovely pink suit being a bystander to the horrors he the director would shot throughout his career. As he finds himself in Hell with demonic worships and Coffin Joe leading them, it leads to his trope as a filmmaker of hiring extras of both genders, in general state of undress, with ghoulish carnival haunted house gore effects like a man having his tongue cut out taking place. In what could be best described as theatrical performance hellscape scenes, if you have seen other films of his, like Awakening of the Beast, and how he let these moments stretch out for their ghoulishness for minutes, this is the same thing here to escalate the film closer to his other work from the time. The crossover between character and creators is not as complex as Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), where Wes Craven revisited Freddy Krueger as an entity terrorising the people who made his films, but here you at least have Marins forced to confront his creation. Bemused as a terrified bystander who only intervenes when a child is threatened, this is an example a good few decades earlier, involves the creator in actual debate with the figure he said he created directly. It also emphasises the idiosyncratic, even schism-like, knife-edge too in his work, between revealing in the anti-religious horror but also making sure it always win, which is prevalent even in mind to a politically tumultuous time in Brazil when these films were being made. Like Jose's friend being a Catholic who yet is studying parapsychology without any more issues, his cinema is curious in terms of faith and anti-faith, where he can make Coffin Joe almost a true anti-hero, even if he had to always lose, but also made a film like The End of Man (1970), a film which has Joe's total opposite, a virtuous man of miraculous gifts, even if with satirical edges mocking the world socially and politically around this character. José Mojica Marins certainly hated organised complacency in general, and if there is a sense this films seems a more safer film, it is and is probably one of the reasons it could be seen as a weaker film from the director, as it feels like a pure horror story without an edge to it even with the nastier content coming into it by the end.  He can prod at organised religion in the earlier films, and be more gruesome in Embodiment of Evil (2008) when he would be allowed to get away with it, but still create the kind of film here which have a happy ending to keep the audience happy or a twisted morality play for others, censorship or not. Certainly, as this review started with, it is strange this film is seemingly lost among those available beyond his homeland, especially as it is still a fun production among them.

Marebito (2004)

 

Director: Takashi Shimizu

Screenplay: Takashi Shimizu and Chiaki Konaka

Cast: Shinya Tsukamoto as Masuoka, Tomomi Miyashita as F, Kazuhiro Nakahara as Arei Furoki, Miho Ninagawa as Aya Fukumoto, Shun Sugata as MIB

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Director Shinya Tsukamoto steps in and stars in another's films, that of director Takashi Shimizu. I can see why he brought his talent as an onscreen actor from his own films, a digitally shot horror film with a very idiosyncratic tone. Tsukamoto is Masuoka, a cameraman obsessed with the lives of others, from possible drug addicts living in the building next to his to the catalyst of the tale, a freak subway suicide he caught on tape during his work as a documentary cameraman, part of his desire to capture the fear of those who die may feel. The suicide he caught on camera on camera is not what one would presume, but a random older man stabbing himself in the eye on camera. Strange visions from rewatching this footage and ruminating on its meaning lead to Masuoka returning back to the site he filmed the suicide at and to a small crawlspace that leads into the underground.  

The resulting film is a slow burn which takes plot strands which you would presume would go in an obvious direction, only to confound them. A notable aspect to this, alongside director/co-writer Shimizu co-writer Chiaki Konaka, who I have kept up with and is a very idiosyncratic voice in his own right. I have had to put a hesitance in my respect for him in case he took the conspiracy theories he has touched upon in his work seriously, infamously creating a villain in a radio play for the Digimon anime franchise which was a physical manifestation of "political correctness", one that used "cancel culture" as an attack¹. When that happened in 2021, people learnt that his blog writings revealed to be interested in such conspiracies¹ in a time, especially in the West, where conspiracy theories have no longer stayed the likes of Area 51 but insidious ones of far-right ideologies which have been allowed to bleed into other conspiracy theories and corrupted the concept. This is something I have to be cagey about, unless it is revealed more to this contextually was lost or he apologises, as Chiaki Konaka is a very distinct writing voice I wish has not been lost in bad ideologies and just bad ideas. He only has a few live action films, and most of his career is in Japanese anime, where very idiosyncratic titles of note like Serial Experiments Lain, a 1998 TV animated series, present such idiosyncratic takes on plotting, on realities bleeding into each other, and references to culture which you find here in Marebito alongside Takashi Shimizu's collaborations.

The title is a clear nod to the references in itself, "marebito" a Japanese concept of spirits or divine beings briefly leaving the afterlife to visit the living world, which happens here explicitly just in how the older man who committed suicide will visit Masuoka. He is part of the elaborate bows around this movie's key storyline, that Masuoka will find a nude woman in this underground world through the subway station, chained to a rock, who he will take up to the surface, christening her "F" (Tomomi Miyashita). She will not eat or drink, but he soon learns she likes the taste of blood, especially human, but Marebito takes unexpected directions in the best of ways. For starters, the underground section before we meet F is distinct, Masuoka finding himself in complex tunnels built in World War II and older, where homeless people there can read your narration monologues and the dead walk, the suicidal man greeting Masuoka, and discussing the differences between the hollow earth theory and that of complex tunnels which he thinks is more legitimate. Konaka's finger prints are all over the references in this, from Madame Blavatsky to the christened F being called Masuoka's Kasper Hauser, in mind to the real figure, a 19th century German youth who was said have grown up in the total isolation of a darkened cell, and the subject of Werner Herzog's 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. F, a mute woman with Dracula-like teeth, is found in the literal mountains of madness, crystallised architecture out of Lovecraftian lore, apt as Konaka has written Cthulian Mythos works, and that there is an explicit reference to her likely being related to the "Deros". These figures wandering the place of great danger, portrayed by Butoh dancers, and are her likely kin are explicitly creations of a science fiction writer named Richard Sharpe Shaver, an American whose stories of underground cave dwelling entities called Deros which were presented to Amazing Stories magazine as real documentations of this race.

This still shows the hand of Shimizu as well, the opaque tone of Marebito created between the two writers one of its best aspects, where even when it plays with the idea this is all Masuoka's sanity collapsing, it confounds this. It never goes for the obvious, which presents a far more appropriately eerie tone for horror storytelling, where the unknown in the plot, the completely unexplained, is more terrifying. It is very different horror film in general, with the literary and mystical references. Even when an obvious plot thread comes ahead, Masuoka killing people to feed F as he comes to love her in a weird daughter/lover/pet relationship, it undercuts this on purpose when other films could drag on to less interesting escalations. In terms of the central production,

Tsukamoto is not a case of a director who narcissistically puts himself in central roles in his own films, but part of both the collaborative nature of said films, starting his career in a theatrical troupe whose put together his debut Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) together even if he became the auteur director, and also because he is a compelling actor in his own right. It is fascinating when he appears in others' films, just memorable in Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer (2001), and here he fits this role of a small man with a strange obsession as comfortable as ones from his own films like Bullet Ballet (1998), about his character crafting a handmade firearm in mourning of a loved one's suicide and a fixation on destruction through guns. Here, what could become a simple horror premise, which could have still been fun, becomes compelling by both the dreamlike logic and Tsukamoto's committed performance for a character obsessed with fear. Credit also has to be made, in terms of performance, for Tomomi Miyashita as F. Early in her career, which contains many tokusatsu works like multiple roles in the Ultraman franchise coming later on, there is the clear sense she has a dance background as her performance, mostly without dialogue having to convey F in only entirely movements. Bravely introduced contrasting her physical beauty against the violence of her bruised leg chained to a wall, she contrasts explicit sensuality in the characterisation against animalism, cat-like moments around an apartment which uncomfortable contrasts, of an animal which consumes blood against a sensuality, the uncomfortable schism of beastly violence and even bestiality against lust and love. Her performance is just as important and good, and it is a shame there are less prominent roles in her filmography.

Marebito never takes the expected route, and even when it hints at this all being in Masuoka's head, that within itself is a rug pull moment in an interesting twist, an existential tangent contemplating the scenario at the coast with a dead man as a thoughtful conversationalist. Chiaki Konaka has left many of his stories in animation ambivalent on the reality, not always metaphorical but literally with stories set in fictional stages, characters breaking through timelines, or characters becoming spiritual entities in the literal sense having been once robots that become of living flesh. It has a dream logic, which is apt and nicely contrasts the shot-on-digital realism shot on the streets. A random salary man beating Masuoka up for filming has no real story beat, but feels right for character beats instead, and simple things like a mobile phone in a back alley for Masuoka to answer is both a natural moment that feels surreal but could happen, becoming menacing for a horror story.

In the end, you can argue even if held in perpetual fear for all his life or afterlife, Masuoka could effectively have gained a happy conclusion if only filmed and chained to the same rock with F. It may seem an odd idea to view this as a happy ending, now her pet, but considering the perversity and tone of the film before, it seems credible even if a truly eerie ending as well. Obviously, you cannot ignore that, in between the filming of this film, Takashi Shimizu was building The Grudge franchise he started from his indie filmmaking era into bigger and bigger theatrical productions, cultivating a legendary horror franchise of his own creation. Making this in-between those, it is great he was also creating this unique production, but it is a film stuck within a legacy which could easily overshadow this, more so as this is a title from the Tartan Asian Extreme era of UK film distribution, the legendary sub label of a distributor that is long gone and thus lost to old DVD copies. This, especially in mind to the early digital filmmaking era of the 2000s yet to be acclaimed as a niche, is one of those little gems needing to be re-evaluated.

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1) Digimon Tamers 20th Anniversary Stage Show Features 'Cancel Culture' Villain, written by Kim Morrissy and published for Anime News Network on 4th August 2021.

The Da Vinci Virus (2005)

 

a.k.a. Cup of My Blood

Director: Lance Catania

Screenplay: Lance Catania and Kenneth Nilsson

Cast: Daniel Patrick Sullivan as Jack Fender; Janina Gavankar as Iona; Allie Smith as Tina; Roger Anderson as Sparky; Lance Mulvaney as Alex; Circus-Szalewski as Nibbles; John Turk as Memoli

Ephemeral Waves

 

The Da Vinci Virus is a film you the reader may have never heard of before. In reality, its real title is Cup of My Blood, a low budget religious suspense film with horror tropes, but I came to this when it was under an entirely different title to ride the coattails of another bigger film, something its director/co-writer Lance Catania probably did not know about for its British release. This is a tradition that has managed to last even into the streaming era, for better and for worse, in that in the past, of taking grindhouse/drive-in films and selling them under new names on the back of big Hollywood films, something which also found its way into the 2000s DVD era here, clearly distributed under a different name for British supermarket sells on DVD to sell off the back of The Da Vinci Code, the 2006 film adaptation of the big Dan Brown novel. With hindsight, there is remotely no connection to Brown's success, controversial and divisive 2003 novel at all, making the act of having read The Da Vinci Code and rewatching the 2006 adaptation starring Tom Hanks pointless. The context is important as, whilst an unofficial "mockbuster" title, this is the context of how I came to this film, and how it once came to be among the "worst I had ever seen", so it is worth establishing my history before returning to this.

For those who do not know, Brown's fiction novel became a huge seller but a controversial one, about a symbologist named Robert Langdon who finds himself in a conspiracy about the truth of Jesus Christ's legacy. It was accused for being blasphemous; it was challenged for the theories it was based on in premise; it was sued for "borrowing" said theories from the non-fiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982); and was challenged as being badly written. It however became a cultural zeitgeist that helped put Dan Brown on the map, and the decision to rename Cup of My Blood into the title I came to it as, when my parents bought it, was likely in mind to the hype behind the 2006 film, directed by Ron Howard and with Tom Hanks playing Langdon. Reading the book, it is fun if you take a pinch of salt every time Brown brings in facts of history and art, pulpy hokum in its page and adapted form. Truthfully, none of it connects at all to Virus, baring the likelihood to albino henchman briefly seen is connected to one from the book tentatively. Whether you think of the Da Vinci Code - love it, loath it, think it is the work of Satan - it does deserve to be canon in pop culture, and I have no shame in enjoying the thing with no expectations, as this pop culture phenomenon that blew up in my adolescence, never reading the tome until for this review, has the pace and tone of naive eyed silliness to it I could appreciate. With mind this segment was meant to be a prologue to the film I covered, only for them to be entirely foreign to each other in premise and tone, The Da Vinci Virus is a film which could have been something interesting as a low budget oddity, and is instead a curious schism of ideas of its own which awkwardly mismatch.

There is, before anyone asks, no references to Leonardo Da Vinci whatsoever in this film, the Italian polymath a huge part to the Da Vinci Code's premise, and the only connection to religion in its apocalyptic premise, which touches on a Book of Revelations style scenario, is the Holy Grail, the cup Christ drank at the Last Supper before his crucifixion. It is turned into a MacGuffin here in a curious mix of the profane, religious iconography, discussion about photography clearly of interest to Lance Catania, who beyond this film is primarily a cinematographer, and what he likely brought to the script on a personal level, cheesy horror tropes and a surprising level of sexual explicitness, with a pronounced level of green hue to everything in the DVD version we got in supermarkets.

The Grail is there to heed the apocalypse; with a touch of the Ark of the Covenant from the Indiana Jones films there is the issue when handling this sacred object as, if the person not chosen to protect it opens the box it is housed in, everyone who does is turned into a (CGI assisted) skeletal husk by the spectres of former protectors. The one chosen to protect this box is Jack (Daniel Patrick Sullivan), a former art gallery/art book photographer who has fallen into being the photographer for a porn website "2nd Cumming", which will later be revealed to be a (not so) secret cover for a religious conspiracy group. This was the aspect I remembered as the most idiosyncratic and likely to still be the most memorable thing of all this film, as that does raise an eyebrow as an idiosyncratic plot choice alongside naming a side character of importance "Nibbles". Jack's career choice, even if he will argue about the virtues of photo film over digital, is trauma over the murder of his girlfriend Tina, who died three years prior to the start of the film and is clearly a more suspect event from the get-go to its cause. Neither helping is that ghosts who have clearly been inspired by the 2000s boom in J-horror, terrified by images of black eyed spooky children and grey undead figures, are haunting him.

The religious may not appreciate the premise, including the mix of sexuality into this, although I should be frank in saying that this is not really a religious film with its apocalypse threat and talk of a chosen, more a secular pulp plot tone that could have changed the Christian iconography to high fantasy tropes and not changed much in the plot, which is one of the huge issues with this. When the double-double crosses and abrupt crucifixions with guts disembowelled out the body transpiring, it would have been appreciated if this had really taken the esoteric route further in referencing real dogma, even if in a profane direction, to make the plot more than the boiler plate one it does become. When it is proclaiming that the Second Coming will actually be by way of binary code, you see what a weird and interesting film this could have been, even as a low budget pulp one, but it feels instead a film which "could have" been this. This feels lost in all the plot it wants to get into, the reason likely I hated this back in the day alongside my dismissive attitude to low budget cinema, when the low budget cinema aesthetic and the clear idiosyncrasies, the sexuality and the obsession with photography, are the more compelling touches. Honestly its interest in sexuality is the one aspect to the film which could have sold it for luridness but actually becomes the most compelling aspect, especially as this is riffing on eroticism as found in photography art books, something distinct as a subject to touch on. Contrasting the porn site's blatantness with the erotic art of Jack, which does evoke real art book productions, even when being blasphemous with the melding of sensuality with Christian iconography you see that, in another world, Lance Catania and Kenneth Nilsson with the script could have jettisoned the apocalypse plot as this is clearly more interesting to the pair of them. Horror plot themes could have still been in this, of the figure named Iona (Janina Gavankar) who inspires Jack romantically and creatively, with the horror being that she is not who she may seem as the ideal. Even the starkness of the porn shots, actresses bluntly asking which dildo to use, as a nice contrast, whilst keeping the philosophical porn producer with shady criminal edges to him, is a more compelling idea than the conspiracy plot is wrapped within.

The plot itself is ambitious and convoluted, but also with the sense, even if you only had access to some locations including an indoor swimming pool, it feels far less interesting than being in this world of a photographer trying to find himself. In general, whatever budget, I find that the plot structures are less inteteresting than the tropes meant to sell a film, and here you have such a vague religious end of the world scenario, as you might find in a big Hollywood film, that is not interest, which means the Holy Grail or the ghosts to loomed around are of far less interest than the quirks. The gore that is split, some lower budget CGI and some fake guts, feels with a sense that if this had let its hair done and been more indulgent, embracing the absurd tone with its green hued corridors and apartments feeling like liminal spaces, I might have been able to appreciate this more. [Huge Spoiler] When it even pulls the twist Jack killed his own girlfriend by accident, but hid the body and had traumatising amnesia, it cements the curse this decided to put upon itself with trying to follow what is expected as compelling genre thriller tropes than just being indulgent. [Spoilers End]

The irony is that, whilst with little connection to each other, The Da Vinci Code managed to be compelling because for all the controversies about it showing real theories of the true nature of Christ, it was far more interesting as the adventures of the least conventional hero and his quirks, Robert Langdon, in a very over-the-top adventure where the clues and suspense where in the least conventional ways possible, by looking at all paintings and trying to find clues. All pretensions of its real theories was lost to pure old school storytelling when, whether tasteful or not, a Catholic albino monk assassin was brought in, and even Dan Brown's shoehorned attempts at profoundness in the cultural references in the novel had an eccentric charm. With hindsight, it became for me that weird and eccentric work which inexplicably caught fire, rather than stay an obscure work as an idiosyncratic author, and become a megahit. The Da Vinci Virus as I learnt of it as is as brazen in its own way, which I have to admire, part of an era of straight-to-DVD pulp cinema that will eventually get interest for how it led to curiosities like this, but with this one unfortunately a title which took too many clichés from bigger films than ride its own idiosyncrasies.

Bad Dreams (1988)

 

Director: Andrew Fleming

Screenplay: Andrew Fleming and Steven E. de Souza

Cast: Jennifer Rubin as Cynthia Weston; Bruce Abbott as Dr. Alex Karmen; Richard Lynch as Franklin Harris; Dean Cameron as Ralph Pesco; Harris Yulin as Dr. Berrisford; Susan Barnes as Connie; John Scott Clough as Victor; E. G. Daily as Lana; Damita Jo Freeman as Gilda; Louis Giambalvo as Ed; Susan Ruttan as Miriam

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

In the shadow of Nightmare on Elm Street becoming a huge horror franchise in the late eighties, 20th Century Fox joined among others on the supernatural horror bandwagon with Bad Dreams, in which the prologue, as you always want, introduces a cult actor like Richard Lynch in a prominent cast member, in this case as the head of a hippy cult, Franklin Harris, anointing members with what seemingly is ladles of water.

It is later revealed it was gasoline, the house exploding from the resulting fire, beginning the film with one survivor Cynthia, a young teen, having to bare the memories of what happened after the thirteen year coma she wakes from after the incident. This is a big film in context of this genre, in terms of the studio distributing it, just from the soundtrack -  I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night) by The Electric Prunes, a punk cover of My Way, and more strikingly Guns 'n' Roses before they went big with Sweet Child of Mine, long before it become a radio staple even here in Britain - and there is a deliberately sense of this trying to match the success Nightmare on Elm Street had. Specifically, this was made after the third film, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), which managed to figure out the tone of the series and become a favourite for fans, this explicitly riffing on its premise and re-casting Jennifer Rubin, a prominent side character in that film, as the lead Cynthia here. Prominently as well, with director Andrew Fleming starting here and continuing through the next decades in Hollywood, you have as his co-writer on the script Steven E. de Souza, a big figure in Hollywood who, also in 1988 when Bad Dreams was released, co-penned the script for Die Hard, which mid-way through a career with credits alongside other big actor films is arguably the hugest title for his entire career. Souza is someone I like, even when his directed and written attempt to adapt Street Fighter (1994) as a video game franchise to the big screen was seen as a failure, and you can spot his sense of humour and witticisms throughout this.

The Dream Warriors set up, of a group of patients being targeted one-by-one by an unnatural force, is obvious here, as with Harris the cult leader who, like Freddy Krueger with his burnt face make-up, occasionally appears burnt up to in the border beyond life and death. Like Dream Warriors, it is a series of set pieces where people are picked off with the only difference that, with the doctor running the group here, said male figure here is openly a sceptic to the scenario who is yet trying to rationalise the alarming number of freak deaths taking place one soon after another. Honestly, Bad Dreams is pure horror spectacle even in terms of being pure cheese as well as what works, with some flair but until its ending twist is going in an expected route for the set-up even in terms of the exaggerated takes on mental health by a game cast, such as the nervous wreck of a former newspaper reporter, for the equivalent of a Weekly World News where Bat Boy came from, who chain smokes like a furnace. They are picked off one-by-one in inventive deaths like Dream Warriors, the equivalent of a haunted house ride of a film, and your taste will entirely depend on whether you can appreciate this.

There are some memorable incidents, including someone seemingly deciding to play hit-and-run on their senior in the hospital car park and gleefully killing them, to the surprising level of gore such as the gruesome moment someone ends up going through the turbine in the boiler room and literally recreating the song Raining Blood from Slayer onscreen. Probably the most idiosyncratic aspect of this whole film does need major spoilers, but suffice to say, this set up with a supernatural slant becomes a more “rational” ending, which comes off more contrived than if ghosts were involved yet provides an appropriate heightened nature of a ludicrous murder twist. [Major Spoiler] I highly doubt even with the variety of side effects and causes medicines can induce in real life, any that can cause people to kill themselves as happens in this, or hallucinate about Richard Lynch would be allowed anywhere near a medical storage facility on a hospital unless you wanted a scandal. [Spoilers End] It comes off like a giallo twist, where attempting a rational route than taking a supernatural slant becomes stranger than accepting the idea of the unnatural over materialistic logic in a plot. It feels appropriate for the film, far from a criticism, and does provide a distinct touch for Bad Dreams. Even in among this too, remembering the film it was inspired by, this does thankfully play to some unnatural imagery as it subjectively pulls the rugs out from under a viewer a few times. In reference to something that is already talked of, without spoiling which scene mentioned it is, this manages to get away with the “it is all a dream” segment twist by having a moment so abrupt and jarring for a character to be involved with that it actually comes off as gleefully inspired in a sick humoured way.

Of course as well, it provides a fascinating tangent into the careers for those involved as Steven E. de Souza is a big name from this era of action and Hollywood blockbusters, making a rare jump into horror cinema, and Andrew Fleming, despite mostly staying out of the genre, if more well known for The Craft (1996), a film I will admit I always found disappointment in for how its ending seemingly conforms against the promise it has about all female tale about witchcraft, but had a legacy for people who caught it at the right age. This is a cool piece in their careers, not the best of these Elm Street inspired films but certainly a memorable one.