Brain Blasters

Not one to let being late to the party get in the way of verbiage, allow me now to add my voice to the chorus of praise for Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. Though it has, in some quarters, been referred to as the anti-Twilight, but such a designation does no justice at all to a film as complex, witty, moving and gloriously horrific as this one.

Scripted by John Ajvide Lindqvist (based on his novel of the same name), and set in a dreary 70s Sweden that would have Ingmar Bergman nodding in appreciative recognition, this is the tale of Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a shy, sensitive 12-year-old. His divorced parents have little time for him, but Conny (Patrik Rydmark), the school bully, has plenty. Life is thus pretty miserable, and Oskar spends many an evening hanging around the sad-looking playground of the apartment complex where he lives. One night, he meets Eli (Lina Leandersson), who appears to be a young girl his age, even though she feels no need to wear winter clothing. Eli is, in fact, a vampire, and is accompanied by Håkan (Per Ragnar), her aging Renfield figure, who is having increasing trouble harvesting blood for her. His attempts are both horrific in their detail, and hilarious as they start to go wrong. At any rate, the two outsiders soon bond, and Oskar begins to blossom and find inner strength, even as he penetrates deeper into Eli’s dark world.

So we’ve had plenty of horror remakes, and we’ll continue to have plenty more. Most, as we know, are at best middling, at worst utter desecrations of the originals. We have had some cases where a remake might actually make sense, cases where the first film could certainly do with some improvement. Amityville Horror, I’m looking at you. And yet somehow, that remake managed to be worse. The job is made easier for the upcoming Friday the 13th retread, since the original, despite its iconic status, is nothing more than hackwork, and I say that with love. But the current offering, and today’s topic, is the 3D return to My Bloody Valentine.

Now, I have a great deal of fondness for the original, not all of which is Canadian pride in a homegrown product. There’s a nice, gritty atmosphere and setting, the killer is well designed, and the murders (truncated though they originally were -- all hail the  restored release!) are inventive. But let’s not kid ourselves, either. This ain’t Bergman. This is no holy text.

Pupi Avati’s The House with Laughing Windows (1976) isn’t the most high-profile Italian horror film, and only landed a legit North American release with Image's 2002 DVD release. But it has been a succès d’estime for quite some time, particularly in its homeland, and it is well worth tracking down. Viewers looking for something fast-paced, or a Lucio Fulci-style gorefest will be disappointed, but those willing to work with it will find a deeply atmospheric, disturbing and intelligent contemporary gothic with elements of the giallo.

Stefano (Lino Capolicchio) is an art restorer who arrives in an out-of-the-way village to rescue a damaged church fresco depicting the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. He is initially very impressed by the artist’s ability to capture pain, but the more he uncovers of the painting, and the more works by the deceased artist he sees, the more disturbed he is by the man’s obsessive depictions of cruelty and death. When a friend of his, who claims something terrible is happening in the village, is killed, Stefano is drawn further and further into a deadly mystery, at whose centre lies the impulse behind these gruesome images.

I have, for work-related reasons, been watching quite a number of European horror films in close succession, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s. Yesterday, in the middle of this, I was moved to reflect on what seems to be a fairly significant difference between the British and Continental films. I won't go so far as to claim that what I'm going to describe is universal, but it is prevalent enough to be, at the very, very least, a marked trend. And it is this: that the Continental variant has a distinctly sleazier feel than do its cousins.

Now, sleaze is an extremely subjective term. How, precisely, does one define it? This is not the place to attempt to answer such a weighty question, but I do feel I should remind my patient reader that, in these quarters, the term is frequently not pejorative, but often a mark of the highest praise. Furthermore, as I said above, this isn't a universal law. England's Pete Walker has pumped out a body of work that is emphatically sleazy, as is evident from the titles alone: House of Whipcord, Die Screaming Marianne , The Flesh and Blood Show, and so on. But his films, memorably described by Kim Newman as “defiantly grotty,” stand out as such because they are, relatively speaking, the exception that proves the rule. Hammer is, of course, the paradigm for British horror, and as prurient as some of its later offerings  would become (Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire, To the Devil a Daughter), there was always an aura of polished respectability about the films. Whereas on the Continent, the films were notably far more sexualized, to the point, at times, of completely erasing the line between porn and horror. Thus, people like Jean Rollin and Jess Franco would move back and forth between making outright hardcore and more traditional genre fare.

Some movies have “cult” written all over them. But that can actually be counterproductive. If the psychotronic audience sense the film is trying too hard to be a cult epic, then it risks rejection. In this context, I’m not quite sure what to think of Minoru Kawasaki’s The World Sinks Except Japan (2006).

Kawasaki is a filmmaker who is idiosyncratic, to put it mildly. His work is gradually becoming available to North American audiences, with such titles as The Calamari Wrestler and Executive Koala leading the pack (and those titles are not metaphors – they literally describe the main characters). I confess to being very curious to see what he does with his recent revival of Guilala (in The Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit) – surely the giant monster that the fewest people have been clamoring to see again. The World Sinks Except Japan is another film whose title precisely describes the central concept. When everywhere else drops beneath the waves, Japan is flooded with refugees from the rest of the world. Result: Americans reduced to service sector jobs, Chinese and Korean leaders suddenly becoming lapdogs to the Japanese Prime Minister, caricatures of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis play-act action scenes for chump change, and so on.

First, let me wish my fellow site scribes and whoever might be reading this the best of the season. Now I should turn to the painful task of following up my speculative piece a couple of weeks ago about what might go wrong with the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, a blockbuster whose success is so anemic that, a few years from now, it will certainly have lapsed into sufficient obscurity that whatever profile it might still have will be the result of masochists voluntarily subjecting themselves to its inanities. It will, in other words, have become a cult film, but of the sort where the cult’s loyalty is the loyalty of absolute contempt.

My concern leading up to seeing the film was that the need to provide big-bang FX would overwhelm the story itself. In this, I was both right and wrong. Yes, the grand spectacle is saved up for the end of the film, but as spectacles go, it isn’t all that impressive. And there is enough flash during the rest of the film to keep those jonesing for eye candy satiated. Keanu Reeves, meanwhile, acquits himself honorably as Klaatu, quite convincingly coming across as an alien in a human body. Where the film fails, and fails in jaw-dropping manner, is at the level of the script.

It hardly needs to be pointed out that the DVD revolution has been a boon for fans of European horror. Where once we had to make do with grainy bootleg VHS copies of the works of Argento, Fulci and Bava, now we can pick up beautifully transferred copies of pristine prints of uncut versions. Life is good. What has also followed is a massive increase in the availability of films by the less commercially successful, more niche-oriented directors – I’m thinking particularly of Jess Franco here. Franco, through sheer volume of work alone, retains the crown of king of erotic horror. But he does have a serious competitor, whose films are finally becoming easily available on disc. I refer here to Jean Rollin.

Like Franco, Rollin operates on a shoestring budget, and has moved back and forth between relatively mainstream exploitation (to coin an oxymoron) and outright porn. There are even instances where who directed what film can be confusing (as in Virgin Among the Living Dead, where Franco’s original film was reworked later with zombie footage shot by Rollin). The peak of Rollin’s creativity was the 1970s, which saw the release of his erotic vampire films (Lèvres de sang, La vampire nue, Requiem pour un vampire and so on). His films are characterized by striking pictorial beauty, economical but nonetheless effective surrealism, and rather perfunctory (at times, it would seem, improvised) plots and dialogue. One of his best, 1979's Fascination, was released by Redemption at the end of October.

Samuel Goldwyn’s endlessly quoted “If you want to send a message, call Western Union” is a dictum that films beyond counting have challenged, some more successfully than others. It’s a tricky balancing act – audiences tend to resent being preached at, but if the message is coupled with a strong story, the result can be powerful.

A certain degree of dispensation, it could be argued, hovers around the science fiction film. Science fiction has been called the literature of ideas. This is not as true about its cinematic cousin, as SF authors have frequently pointed out, but nonetheless, there are plenty of ideas, some better than others, popping out of the SF film. This is perhaps by virtue of it being part of the broader cinema of the fantastic, where the spectacle of the impossible invites audiences to interpret what they are seeing in a metaphorical or allegorical light. Some films, however, don’t leave things to chance, and are forthright in challenging the audience to engage with them at the level of ideas moreso than at the level of characterization, plot or spectacle. This isn’t to say that those last three elements are unimportant, but they can be put to the surface of the – dare I say it – philosophical project of the film. 2001: A Space Odyssey is epitome of this phenomenon. A more modest, but no less explicit, example would be 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still.

It must be at least five minutes since I last complained about ill-advised remakes, so it's past time I returned to the subject. It was recently brought to my attention that yet another remake of The Lodger is in the works. The trailer is up on YouTube for those of you with a masochistic bent to examine. Now, far be it from me to prejudge a film based solely on the trailer, but I'm going to do it anyway.

The first version of The Lodger was an early Hitchcock effort from 1927. Lead Ivor Novello would return to the part five years later for the first sound version of the story, but the most prominent incarnation is the John Brahm take from 1944, with Laird Cregar as the titular lodger. Said character is, for those unfamiliar with the tale, Jack the Ripper, who rents a room in a middle-class neighbourhood, and subsequently develops an unhealthy interest in the daughter of the household, even as she, like a moth to a flame, is fascinated by him. Cregar gives us a man driven by his suppressed by raging sexual conflicts to terrible violence, and creates a monster who is nevertheless recognizably human. The audience actually comes very close to sympathizing with the murderer, and we KNOW he's the killer. Thus, Merle Oberon's interest in him (which, in the 1944 film at least, stops short of becoming romantic interest, since police detective George Sanders is on hand to provide that) is all the more understandable, since she doesn't know (though she might suspect) what we do.

When I wrote about Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, I said I would get around to talking about Terence Fisher’s The Gorgon (1964). So today I will. Curse is an example of Hammer at its most workmanlike. The movie, as I said, is fun but slight. The Gorgon, on the other hand, is Hammer and Fisher at their best, a film of considerable beauty and resonance.

After a young artist’s girlfriend is killed and turned to stone, and he hangs himself, the inquest declares the deaths the result of a crime of passion. The artist’s father, understandably skeptical, refuses to leave the little town of Vandorf after the inquest, despite the villagers’ hostility. He discovers the existence of Megara the gorgon, but at the cost of his life. His second son (Martin Pasco) arrives to continue the investigation, and after a near miss that nearly costs him his life, he is joined by his mentor (Christopher Lee), while falling in love with his nurse (Barbara Shelley). The road to true love does not run smoothly, however, as the film makes it quite clear midway through that Shelley is in fact Megara. She doesn’t know this herself, but local doctor Peter Cushing certainly does, but his obsessive love for Shelley leads him to cover everything up.