Brain Blasters

As promised last week, this monster-lover’s thoughts on Cloverfield. In a word: joy. In the pantheon of giant monster rampages, this one should find a place of honour. There have been a few good such films in the last while (most notably The Host, though one could argue that its creature is too small to make it a proper Giant Monster Movie), but this is the first really fine example to emerge from Hollywood in decades. Among other accomplishments, it washes away, once and for all, the sour taste left by the Emmerich/Devlin Godzilla (partly by taking some similar moments and showing how they should be done).

I won’t say too much about the plot, out of deference to those who might not have seen the film yet. The less you know, the more fun you’ll have. Suffice to say that a giant creature attacks New York, and the whole thing is presented as being shot on camcorder by a terrified witness and his friends. But then, you already knew that.

And so here we are, on the opening night of Cloverfield. This is a film that, as a huge fan of creature features, I devoutly hope will be good. So my thoughts on that perhaps next week. But with the possibility of the first original giant monster movie to come out of Hollywood since... since... Tremors?... being worth seeing, an unfortunate screening experience last night has moved me to reconsider some remarks I made here some time ago. At the time, I was mounting a defense of cheap CGI creature-featrues (of the sort that inevitably winds up on the Sci-Fi Channel) by making the case that they were analogous to the B-level monster movies of the fifties.

To a certain degree, I stand by those remarks. But I do wish to temper them somewhat, because I just watched Lake Placid 2. In the first place, this is a sequel a little tardy in coming. But perhaps the filmmakers were counting on the fact that most people would remember little else beyond the original’s title and the fact that there was a crocodile, since they re-use the same character types (only none are at all interesting). The humour of the original has also gone AWOL, even though the film seems to think that it’s being funny (it isn’t).

Some films have the sort of subject matter that just screams “cult in the making.” Sometimes, the attempt at cult status is so blatant that the sense of the film trying too hard is off-putting. On other occasions, said status is a by-product of a filmmaker simply having assured fun with torqued material. Bubba Ho-Tep is one such example. A brand new one is Black Sheep.

The tale is basically one of family tragedy. Years ago, a young boy is traumatized when his nasty older brother torments him with the corpse of his murdered pet sheep, and moments later they find out that their shepherd father has plunged to his death from a cliff. In the present day, the now sheep-phobic young man (Nathan Meister) returns to the family farm, hoping to confront and dismiss his fears. Unfortunately, his still nasty older brother’s genetic projects get out of hand and result in a horde of murderous sheep. To make matters worse, being bitten by one of these critters leads to a very hilarious form of lycanthropy.

All right, after a longer delay than expected (my apologies), here with go with John Brahm’s The Lodger (1944). This is actually a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 effort, but Brahm’s film stands just fine on its own, thank you very much. Laird Cregar plays the title character. He is none other than Jack the Ripper, renting an upstairs room in a fashionable district. There he performs some rather dark medical experiments and obsesses over his deceased younger brother. Meanwhile, the family (pater familias Sir Cedric Hardwicke, mother Sara Allgood and singer/dancer daughter Merle Oberon) have more and more unanswered questions about their tenant. Hardwicke holds his suspicions at bay, but Allgood and Oberon become more and more nervous. Oberon has every reason to be, as her profession marks her as a likely Ripper target (so, yes, the fact that the actual killer’s victims were all prostitutes is rather glossed over). George Sanders shows up as the Scotland Yard detective assigned to the case, and also as Oberon’s love interest.

There have been so many Jack the Ripper movies, one must be very, very cautious about calling this or that one the definitive tale. I won’t make such a claim for The Lodger, but it is easily one of the best. Unlike Brahm’s The Undying Monster, which, as I wrote two columns ago, is fun but uneven, here Brahm has a film that is perfectly consistent in tone. The opening murder is chilling, a textbook perfect exercise in showing just enough to set the mind in overdrive, imagining all sorts of brutal horrors. Thereafter, the film becomes a case of gradually mounting suspense, as Oberon unknowingly places her neck in a slowly tightening noose.

As I’ve indicated in this space before, one of the joys of the DVD age is the chance to see, at long last, films that one might have heard about since childhood, but that were unavailable until now. A recent addition to Fox’s Cinema Classics line is a case in point. Fox Horror Classics consists of three movies directed by John Brahm, and the one I want to talk about today is The Undying Monster (1942), which I first read about over thirty years ago.

The occasion of my initial encounter with the movie was a mention of it in Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies (quite the seminal book in my childhood, as, I imagine, it was for many horror fans my age). This is what Gifford writes:

So I was musing over the last couple of days once again on the nature of the appeal of what I’m (extremely) broadly defining as cult movies. I’m not explicitly looking for a Grand Unification Theory here, though I wouldn’t turn my nose up at one if it turned up. There are some easy answers, but they’re very much only partial ones.

Let’s deal with them first. Yes, there are plenty of cult films that are extraordinary works, classics by any definition, even if they tend to escape the mainstream’s notice. But these are purely and simply fine cinema, and one need not look far to see why people like these movies. After all, why wouldn’t they?

The wonderful thing about cult film fandom is the peculiar obsessions that typify it. I’m thinking specifically here of the enthusiastic loyalty fans have for a given director or performer, whatever said person’s standing in the mainstream film community might be (and very often in defiance of such). Hence, for instance, the following that Joe D’Amato commands. As for performers, let’s think for a moment about character actors. I’ve already documented my great fondness for Michael Ripper, he of the bulging eyes and multiple bit parts in Hammer films. Well, I have in my hands a delightful little tome that does me one better.

Last night, the Winnipeg Cinematheque hosted a launch of Kier-La Janisse’s A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (FAB Press). “Who?” you might be asking. I confess that I was when I first heard of the project. The short answer is that he was a character actor who showed up (often very, very briefly) in over 70 Italian films, in everything from spaghetti westerns to cop thrillers to gialli. His look is a bit of a sleazy, greasy cross between Guy Pearce and Steve Buscemi. The launch was accompanied by a screening of Umberto (Cannibal Ferox) Lenzi’s enormously entertaining Violent Naples (1976), a Dirty Harry variation with John Saxon (speaking of character actors) as one of the lead baddies. Rossi pops up (in, according to Janisse’s book, one of his best roles) as an absolutely irredeemable rapist/thief. His demise (impaled through the throat on a metal pole) is applause-worthy.

Time for another entry in the Wish List, my lament for sorely absent DVD releases. Today: Paperhouse, to date available only in Region 2 and 4 imports, which is a real tragedy. Allow me to explain.

When I first saw Paperhouse on VHS back in the mid-90s, it was the first time in far too long that a film managed to frighten me. This was all the more surprising in that it is based (loosely) on Marianne Dreams, a children’s book by Catherine Storr. But given how so many children’s tales are based on some pretty primal nightmares, perhaps it is fitting that I felt an atavistic chill. Director Bernard Rose would go on to direct Candyman, to date still the best adaptation of a Clive Barker tale, but for my money this is a more affecting and more frightening film.

So I’m in the middle of working my way through Severin’s latest Black Emanuelle box set, and a screening of Black Emmanuelle/White Emmanuelle (actual title Black Velvet) has prompted these musings, which I inflict on you here rather than in the review itself. Now, European sexploitation movies from the 70s aren’t exactly the deepest experience going, but there’s plenty of food for thought in this film, even despite (or because of) its flaws.

First, let’s consider the characters. Laura Gemser reprises her role yet again as Emanuelle (ignore the second “m” of the title). But whereas in the other entries of the series (particularly the Joe D’Amato ones) she is a photojournalist. Here, she’s a supermodel. This is a pretty significant switch. Now, I’m not about to make any kind of crazy argument about the gender sensitivity of D’Amato’s films. However, as a photographer, Emanuelle controls the gaze. She is using the camera, hers is the active look, and her investigations are usually what power such plots as the films possess. That said, she is very much subject to the male gaze of the actual camera. In Brunello Rondi’s film, she is a very passive figure, figuratively and literally abused and raped by the male photographer, Carlo. So, the question arises, is this an undermining of the character (though Gemser is called on to deliver a much more varied performance than is usually the case), or is it a more honest appraisal of the actual nature of Gemser’s position in a sexploitation film?