Regular Columns

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.

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).