Regular Columns

One of the most devious, and delightful, films I’ve encountered in recent years is Incident at Loch Ness, a film that, if it isn’t the subject of a cult, should be. I mean, my gawd, it has Crispin Glover in a microsecond cameo. The real brilliance of this fake documentary is having Werner Herzog in the lead, a man whose filmography reveals a constant violent collision between fact and fiction, with the relationship not always moving in the direction you might think. Anyone wanting to see just how utterly bizarre things are in Herzogland should look no further than My Best Fiend, his 1999 documentary about his working relationship with actor Klaus Kinski.

The film opens with unexplained footage: Kinski performing before a huge audience, ranting maniacally, going out of his way to alienate everyone within sound of his voice. What this is (which is never mentioned in the film), is part of a tour Kinski did playing Jesus Christ as a psychopathic megalomaniac. Based on the evidence of the rest of the film, Kinski might as well have been playing himself. The picture Herzog presents us with is of a man given the rages that could last days and be triggered by the tiniest of imagined slights, of a character so volcanic he threatened to destroy all around him. And then there’s Herzog, unflappably filming Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, movies whose production and ambition were as insane as their protagonists. In other words, Kinski appears to be playing extroverted versions of Herzog himself in these pics. One understands, therefore, why the Peruvian natives who were extras in the latter film hated Kinski but feared Herzog, reasoning that, as the quiet one, he was probably more dangerous. But one also understands why they offered to kill Kinski for Herzog, and why he later regretted not having taken them up on it.

As everything under to sun sooner or later makes it do DVD, hope turns again to those films that are long, long overdue for the deluxe treatment. Consider this another installment of the Wish List, but with an asterisk. The film in question in Seven Footprints to Satan (1929). I’ll get to the asterisk in due course.

Seven Footprints to Satan was a variation on the Old Dark House film that was so popular in the late-twenties and early-thirties. Here a bored young heir finds himself swept up in a convoluted adventure with menacing figures (human and otherwise), disappearances, abductions, and a sinister conspiracy. SPOILER ALERT: STOP READING THE COLUMN NOW IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE ENDING. But then comes the twist: the entire adventure was a fake, mounted by our hero’s friends to give him the excitement he craved.

Having just watched 30 Days of Night again in order to review the DVD, I find myself thinking about vampires. They are, of course, among the most frequent of horror movie monsters (perhaps only zombies, in their various forms, offer stiff competition in this regard). They also take up far more than their fair share of shelf space in the horror section of your bookstore, thanks to the likes of Anne Rice, Laurel K. Hamilton, and their legions of imitators. A brief scan of the literary and celluloid incarnations of the vampire reveal to principle archetypes. The first, and by far the most common, is the vampire as sexy beast. The other, is the vampire as beast, pure and simple. Interestingly, both cinematic versions, it seems to me, find their models in the first adaptations of the same novel: Dracula.

Nosferatu (1922) and Dracula (1931) were both firsts. Nosferatu was the first film version of Bram Stoker’s novel. Tod Browning’s film was the first legal version. The earlier film gave us Max Schreck as creature as much rat as he was human, and the make-up’s suggested link was underlined by the actual rats that accompanied the vampire on his journey and the plague that descended on the town. Browning offered audiences Bela Lugosi in evening wear, and the film was released on Valentine’s Day. So one vampire to make you faint, the other to make you swoon.

This may be a bit perverse, but I’m going to talk about a film that not only is not currently available on DVD, there is no release date for that format as yet. Fear not, though, as it will surely not be long in coming. The film is Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain!, and it is currently on tour, proving that there is still enormous creative life in the silent film, especially presented when presented in the fully live format. The DVD, inevitably, will be a reflection of the theatrical experience, and while that won’t be as optimal as the live version, it will still be essential viewing for all lovers of the brilliantly bizarre.

As with Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), the protagonist shares the director’s name, which adds a weird layer of god-knows-what to the proceedings. The story sees Guy (Erik Steffen Maahs) returning to the now-deserted island where he grew up. He has come, at his ailing mother’s request, to put a coat of paint on the lighthouse that was: a) the family home; b) the orphanage run by his tyrannical mother; c) the laboratory of his obsessed father. Once there, Guy lapses into memory, and the bulk of the film is traumatic flashback. A young Guy, on the cusp of adolescence, and his older Sis (the only name the film gives her) strike up a friendship with Wendy Hale, one of the Lightbulb Twins, a pair of teenage detectives in the vein of the Famous Five or the Hardy Boys. Wendy has come to investigate Guy’s parents. Guy falls in love with her, but she falls in love with Sis. She then disguises herself as her brother Chance, in order to better seduce Sis, and what follows is a typically Maddinesque nightmare of contorted Freudian sexuality, hilariously melodramatic subtitles (liberally sprinkled with exclamation marks) and comically gothic horror. The style can best be described as a mixture of German expressionism, D.W. Griffth-style adventure melodrama and Eisensteinian editing filtered through a 21st Century sensibility. As with so much of Maddin’s work, the film is an almost indescribable fusion of the cinema’s past and its future, and as such is, in a odd way, timeless.

Every few years, word arrives that the much-lamented Hammer Studios will shortly rise from the ashes. Back in the 90s, for instance, Richard Donner was supposed to be behind a resurrection of the Quatermass films. Well, the word has arrived again, and the revived Hammer has gone at least as far as releasing a teaser trailer and a set visit for its first production in decades: a vampire tale called Beyond the Rave.

You’d think I’d be ecstatic. I love the old Hammer films. When I was a wee tyke, I read about them in my first horror film book. Denis Gifford was writing in 1973, did he but know it very close to the end of the Hammer era. Some of his comments are ironic in one sense or another today. In his introduction, he speculates that “Perhaps time will add its own patina to the Hammer horrors of today.” Very true. But: “In quantity Hammer films are fast approaching Universal, but in quality they have yet to reach Monogram.” Harsh, and history has certainly reached the contrary conclusion, elevating Hammer’s efforts far above those of that poverty row studio. Something else Gifford says has bearing on today’s subject: “The new age of horror was geared to a new taste. Where the old films had quickly cut away from the sight of blood, Hammer cut in for a closeup.” Well, The Curse of Frankenstein and its ilk look pretty tame today, but they were strong meat in their day, and yes, Hammer offered much that was new even as it revived classic gothic horror, which had effectively vanished from the face of the earth from 1946 until 1957, when Hammer stepped up to the plate.