Brain Blasters

This is going to be half a review, and half nostalgia.

In 1980, Dario Argento’s Inferno was released, and, bizarrely, it was one of the films profiled on a kid’s SF TV show I watched back then. The scenes on display sent my terrified little self fleeing from the room. But the images I saw stayed with me, as did the spookily elegant poster I saw on Paris theatre marquees in the weeks that followed: a purple-and-blue skull with a single drop of blood forming at the still-fleshy lips.

A few weeks ago, I nattered on about how Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace differs markedly from the very slasher genre it helped create. The same is true of Bay of Blood, though the comparison is rather more complicated.

The connection between Bay of Blood (AKA Twitch of the Death Nerve) and the slashers is one of the purest examples of superficiality one could think of. Many of the murders in Bava’s film were lifted holus bolus by the first couple of Friday the 13th films (machete to the face, love-making couple speared in bed, and so forth).

Apparently, achieving just the right level of success can work against you. This would appear to be the case of the recent Spanish horror effort [REC]. Co-directed by Jaume Balagueró (who gave us the underrated Darkness and The Nameless) and Paco Plaza, this was one of Spain’s biggest box-office hits last year. Does that earn it a theatrical North American release? Not a bit of it. Instead, it earns itself a remake, under the title Quarantine. Though there are, apparently, some changes being made (the unfortunate jettisoning of the supernatural angle being one), from the looks of things, the new version is going to be a pointlessly exact retread (and speaking of pointless, why give us a trailer that shows the very last shot of the film?). Not only is [REC] not gracing the theatres, it is also being deprived, at least for now, of a domestic DVD release. But if I might speak a word to the wise, it is available as a Region 2 release, so those of you with region-free players know what to do.

Mario Bava is undergoing something of a revival of interest these days, what with Tim Lucas’ magisterial book Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark and the recent Anchor Bay box sets. Over the last little bit, I’ve been re-watching some of Bava’s films, along with a friend who hasn’t seen them before, and I was struck by a comment he made about Blood and Black Lace: that this was the first horror film he’d seen where the victims had no existence other than as victims. This is true, and it made me think about some of the other things that distinguish Bava’s films from the films they would influence.

Flipping through the latest issue of Rue Morgue, I happened on a capsule review that mentioned how most grindhouse fare (whether actual or neo) rarely delivered on its promises. This is, of course, absolutely true, and I don’t for a moment pretend that this comes as news to anyone reading these words. I do want to consider this factor from two angles, though.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of reviewing Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo for this site. Recently out on DVD is his much belated follow-up, The Last Winter (not to be confused with the Canadian coming-of-age tale of the same name). I’m happy to report that the skill Fessenden showed in Wendigo is very much on display in his new feature.

Last week, as I was writing about lost films, I was musing about the many films I had read about in my youth but had never seen. Many of those from the early decades of film history are, I assumed, lost forever. I was thinking particularly of the really early stuff, and particularly of the films of Georges Méliès. While many of his films are still extant (and I have extolled the previous Kino release previously), many of those I had wished to see were those Denis Gifford describes in his Pictorial History of Horror Movies. A prime example would be The Merry Frolics of Satan (1906). The single still in the book – of carriage drawn by a skeletal horse with an accordion-like torso – has always fascinated me. So I was going to mention this film as an example of the lost but lamented. Just to be on the safe side, though, I did a quick search, and discovered, to my delight, that it is NOT lost. To my further delight, I found it on a collection which can best be described as mind-blowing.

So the news this week was very exciting for fans of vintage films, and especially for those whose dreams are haunted by thoughts of lost films rediscovered. Hot on the heels of Kino's announcement of a new DVD release of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, due next year and apparently a further improvement on their previous (superb) release, came word that a completely uncut version of the film had been found in Argentina. That, friends and neighbours, is BIG. The full three-hour-plus version of the film hasn't been seen since the original release, and not everywhere at that. In recent years, we've seen some pretty fine editions of the film, but all of them have had to make do with extensive summaries and mouth-watering stills to fill in the gaps. Certain characters that barely show up, if at all, in what has been seen to date, actually have quite substantial roles in the full version. And now it has been found. True, it's in pretty rough shape, but it exists, and no doubt a full restoration effort is underway. Kino has apparently said that the found footage might well be added to the forthcoming DVD.

We’re all familiar with the zombie movie, most particularly the post-1968 zombie flick. That was the year George Romero permanently transformed the zombie into a flesh-eating ghoul – perhaps the only instance of a long-standing monster having its rules of behaviour altered almost beyond recognition, and to the point that there have been virtually no NON-flesh-eating zombies on film since Night of the Living Dead. But that’s a topic for another time. Co-existing with the neo-zombie movie, and sometimes fusing with it (as in 28 Days Later and its sequel), is the tale of mass psychosis. A recent example is the 2007 film The Signal, directed by David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry and Dan Bush.