Regular Columns

Consider this a follow-up to last week’s column. In my musings about the Big Bug movies, I mentioned that Tarantula had only just become available for the first time as part of a Best Buy-exclusive box set of Universal SF flicks. I’ve managed to lay my hands on this set (again, you can track it down through Amazon if you’re not having any luck with Best Buy itself – for Canadian readers, I should mention that my attempts to track the disc down through the Best Buy website proved fruitless), and for fans of 50'... SF, and particularly the work of Jack Arnold, this is Christmas come early.

Jarck Arnold directed many of the most important SF films of the 1950s. Two of his most beloved films – Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and It Came From Outer Space (1953) – have been out on disc for some time. Most of the other big titles associated with his name are finally available here. One stop shopping.

Big Bug movies. How can one not love them? They have bugs. They’re big. What else do you need to know before you hand out the Oscars?

They heyday of the Big Bug flick was, of course, the 1950's, the era of the great SF boom in the cinema. The first, and best, of these films was Them! (1954). The title is deliberately coy about what the threat is, playing very consciously on Cold War paranoia (after all, who is responsible for everything going on in the world if not the mysterious “them”). Some initia... viewers, it seems, didn’t even know the movie was going to be about giant ants. The film was originally intended to be in 3D and colour, but budget cuts nixed that idea, which is actually for the best. The black-and-white photography varies from moody low key to a flat, semidocumentary look, serving up the perfect mix of atmospheric, almost noir-like mystery in the early goings and the climax, and a nice patina of realism elsewhere. The ants were full-sized mechanical models, and still make quite the impression. The disc from Warner is pretty short on extras, but the print is in nice shape.

Elizabeth Bathory (or, more properly, Erzsébet Báthory) is one of those historical figures just made for horror film. A Hungarian aristocrat, she, if the stories are to be believed, had some 650 young women killed, and would, it has been said, roar from her seat as she watched the torture. And did I mention she believed bathing in blood would keep her eternally young? Eventually, the authorities had at her, and though she was not executed, all the windows and doors of her castle were bricked up, imprisoning her in da...kness until the end of her life. I say, “if the stories are to be believed,” because there are, as one would imagine with this notorious a figure, many disputes (check out the Wikipedia entry and you’ll see what I mean). It has also been argued that she, and not Vlad Tepes, is the real inspiration for Stoker’s Dracula.

At any rate, this kind of tale is too gruesomely juicy to ignore, combining as it does slaughter and sex on an almost apocalyptic scale, and the fact that a woman is the perpetrator is, for good or ill, an added inducement to certain filmmakers and audiences. Bathory sprang to mind because there have been a couple of recent releases that use this figure, and so herewith, a very rough survey of a few of the Bathory films out there.

Recently, Anchor Bay released, at long last, Cemetery Man< to DVD. In so doing, they made available one of the last gasps (for now) of truly first-rate Italian horror, and it might be worth while to spend a few minutes considering the director, Michele Soavi, a man who has been nowhere near as prolific a filmmaker as might be devoutly wished.

In my piece on Joe D’Amato a few weeks ago, I mentioned that the best film he was involved with was Soavi’s debut, StageFright (1987). One of the fascina...ing aspects of this effort is that, while Soavi had been assistant director on films either directed by Dario Argento (Tenebre, Phenomena) or produced by him (Demons< .I>), Argento had no role to play in the making of StageFright. His influence, however, looms large. We can be thankful that it was his aesthetic sense that was a model for Soavi, and not D’Amato’s. In event, this film did wonders with its basic slasher set-up, and its killer’s mask (a gigantic owl’s head) is one that is not soon forgotten by any viewer. Micro-budgeted but a feast for the eyes, StageFright promised much for the future of its director. It remains, as well, his most purely terrifying film.