Regular Columns

A few days ago (and with my advancing age and failing memory, I cannot now recall precisely where), I read a commentator who essentially bemoaned the fact that every single piece of celluloid dreck ever to hit the grindhouse, drive-in, or VHS remainder bin is now being repackaged as a “Cult Classic” on DVD.  There is something to this criticism, but I would argue that, in the final analysis, this is no bad thing.
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This past weekend, the Goya Awards were handed out. These are Spain’s equivalent to the Oscars. And during those awards, there was a moment that, for followers of mainstream film, must surely portend the End of Days, but which for fans of psychotronic or paracinema is tantamount to the Raputre itself: the lifetime achievement award was presented to Jess Franco.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Rip-offs. In the realm of the psychotronic, we love them and loathe them in equal measure. There are those strange and rare moments where the rip-off not only beats the original to the theatres, it out-grosses its rival and turns out to be better, to boot, as was the case with Death Race 2000 triumphing over Rollerball. At the other end of the scale, there are the innumerable “mockbusters” pumped out by The Asylum (Death Racers, The Day the Earth Stopped, Transmorphers, Snakes on a Train, and so on), which actually manage to degrade the term “rip-off” (though I have to say, the climax of Snakes on a Train, where a giant snake eats a train, remains one of the most unusual sights I’ve encountered in the last few years).

Back in the 70s, a little something called Jaws inspired innumerable imitators. Most were execrable. One, Piranha, actually managed to become its own wonderfully oddball work, thanks to the warped sense of humour of Joe Dante, John Sayles, et al. But today, let’s consider a far lesser work: the 1977 Italian exercise in cheese known as Tentacles (released a while back as a double-bill with Empire of the Ants as part of the MGM Midnite Movie series).
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