The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

An ongoing project to survey the best films of individual decades, genres, and filmmakers.
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colinr0380
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#776 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Jun 29, 2012 8:50 pm

If you do watch Cat In The Brain you might appreciate the scene where Fulci, as the director of the film within the film, starts throwing an on-set tantrum about the plate of eyeballs that the crew have brought for him to choose from for the inevitable eye-gouging scene just not being up to his high standards!

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domino harvey
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#777 Post by domino harvey » Fri Jun 29, 2012 9:09 pm

Captivity (Roland Joffé 2007) I should have known better, but this is what happens when curiosity gets the best of you… Two-time Oscar nominee for Best Director Roland Joffé making a torture porn film starring Elisha Cuthbert and co-written by Larry Cohen? Maybe all the critics who tried to warn against this missed some cogent social commentary or veiled self-awareness, I said to myself while watching-- these optimistic thoughts lasted about, oh, ten minutes or so. Cuthbert is a model (of course she is) who is stalked then kidnapped then holed-up in some sort of fantasy basement porn condo wherein she is subjected to nonsensical tortures that are so poorly conceived they fail to be provocative or shocking and become merely tedious (my "favorite" being the false dilemma of either killing a dog or being shot in the head with a shotgun-- wow, what a moral quandary). No one in the film has any characteristics that would make them identifiable as human outside of those necessary for the plot to progress (like, being able to put one foot in front of the other, or wear a tank-top), making this a particularly empty endeavor-- I've seen TV commercials with more multidimensional characters. I thought the film's ending summed up the care and craft that went into the film's construction: A super appears on the screen announcing it's now Six Months Later, followed almost immediately by an interview clip identifying the one-year anniversary of Cuthbert's ordeal.

So the film's stupid, which would justify discounting it with a quick dismissal and moving on were it not for the lingering unpleasantness of its true function. I recently argued that many of the films I'd seen for this project hadn't fit the misogynist buttonhole I'd placed them in with my generalizations about the genre. That's still generally true. But then there's Captivity, which does everything you don't want a movie like this to do. Cuthbert's victim's only crime is being beautiful, as stated over and over by the film in case it wasn't apparent from all goings-on. The film is resentment and anger towards unattainable women taken to an extreme of redundant, empty lashings-out without reason. It is difficult for me to think of another film as baldly hostile to attractive women as this one. To be fair, though, it'd be even more offensive were the misogyny not competing with everything else wrong in the film in the contest for worst aspect. On a basic level (and that's surely the only level this film bothers with-- surface concerns in a film chastising surface concerns, how Derridaian!) Captivity is a horror film version of Fear Factor, as an attractive person is coerced into participating in disgusting behaviors and dangerous stunts for the amusement of an audience seeking artificial superiority-- the audience here being both her captors and anyone getting off to this material, which has all the well-considered logic of an ASSTR story and feels about as meaningful. Perhaps in masturbatory fantasies or DeviantArt comix it makes perfect sense for a model to be held captive in a dingy basement BatCave with technology so advanced and unlikely it might as well take place in an alien spaceship, but in a film it merely comes off as yet more juvenile free-association, contempt for any audience but the one watching to achieve symbolic gratification from the proceedings. If I ever encounter someone who admires this film, I will back away slowly.

Eaten Alive (Tobe Hooper 1977) Well, there goes the theory that croc movies lend themselves to quality, as this is really for fans of shrill shrieking over and over and over and over as the same scenes play out over and over and over and over only. The first line of the film will be immediately familiar to anyone who's seen Kill Bill. It's quickly followed by Robert Englund attempting to anally rape a prostitute. Somehow it's still downhill from there. Unendurable and abrasive beyond belief, I'd sooner sit through a 24-hour loop of Captivity before I'd take a return visit to this backwoods swamp nonsense.

Murders in the Zoo (Edward Sutherland 1933) Animal expert Lionel Atwill employs a menagerie of beasties to quell his jealousy over wife Kathleen Burke in this often brutal, always entertaining b-picture. Charlie Ruggles is on hand to provide the comic relief, allowing everyone else to play their roles straight, which helps the film keep a menacing tone that often proves effectively unsettling.

Street Trash (J Michael Muro 1987) Surely this is the first and last splatter movie to end with a parody of "My Way" playing over the credits! Initially I thought this was a telling conservative satire on the dregs of society, as an exceedingly ugly and loathsome cast of characters-- homeless bums and winos and junkyard workers-- get eliminated in a literally colorful manner: they're melted. There's some spectacularly gory and gratuitous special effects in this film as one swig of the recently uncovered Viper alcoholic beverage turns imbibers into melted Crayola crayons. The film has utter contempt for its victims and their slummy setting and as such seemed at least of interest in terms of its ideological implications (Not unlike Alone in the Dark, which is far more interesting when its conservative eighties ideology is acknowledged and explored). But then the film tips its hand and introduces characters who serve to explicitly mock the conservative ideals of the era. The most explicit embodiment of this competing tack is the renegade cop figure who spouts hilariously obtuse John Milius-aping lines like "I can't answer five dollar questions with five cent answers!" and who at one point beats a mafia thug within an inch of his life, drags him into the bathroom, dumps his head in the stall-urinal and proceeds to vomit on him. As you might suspect, this isn't a pleasant movie, but it at least has the courage of its convictions, however low-hanging that fruit may be. This is a movie whose sole goal is to be an exercise in bad taste, all things against all people, and as such it does not pull any punches. Now, whether that's a worthwhile achievement is another matter. Truth be told, I was amused at first but after about twenty minutes or so I was far beyond getting the point and quickly grew restless. The film's desire to offend everyone, with no clear ideological target or purpose, meant the film was by-design meaningless, an excursion into ugliness for no reason other than the false freedom of "offensiveness," which is no more bold or challenging for filmmakers than being ten years old and telling dirty jokes in the back of the schoolbus.

White Zombie (Victor Halperin 1932) Fleetingly presents an interesting idea-- a powerful man driven by sexual jealousy to essentially reduce his love object to an empty sexual prop-- and then devotes almost the entire movie to Lugosi's vamping and creaky rescues and undramatic drama instead. Too bad.
Last edited by domino harvey on Fri Jun 29, 2012 9:58 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#778 Post by Mr Sausage » Fri Jun 29, 2012 9:19 pm

colinr0380 wrote:If you do watch Cat In The Brain you might appreciate the scene where Fulci, as the director of the film within the film, starts throwing an on-set tantrum about the plate of eyeballs that the crew have brought for him to choose from for the inevitable eye-gouging scene just not being up to his high standards!
Unexpected fact of the day: the giallo called Eyeball about a killer who gouges out people's eyeballs wasn't directed by Lucio Fulci.

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knives
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#779 Post by knives » Fri Jun 29, 2012 9:29 pm

To be fair to Joffe (he doesn't deserve it) and Cohen (he does) by all accounts Captivity was really mangled by the producers with some extra nonsense shot behind their backs. I used to have a list of all of the changes, but it's lost.

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#780 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Jul 05, 2012 3:04 pm

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie aka The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (Jorge Grau, 1974): What a bleak and riveting little movie this is. I was not expecting it to show as much technical skill as it did. It uses its gritty, sunless photography and unsettling score to craft an oppressive air of dread. The frequent slow pans of the dour country-side and lingering shots of clumps of trees or crumbled stone walls continually work up the viewer's expectations of horror and eruptions of violence without offering a release. The movie is such a slow-burn, even when the zombies finally do show up. Mood and atmosphere play the most important role in the film's technique, with the gore left until the end. Who knew the country-side of Northern Britain could be such a terrifying place to encounter zombies. Its fog, dark stone houses, and disconnection from easy avenues of help make it seem oddly claustrophobic despite being wide open. And the bleak, depressing futility of its ending nearly matches that of Night of the Living Dead. My only complaint is that the film trots out one of my least favourite Italian-horror stock types, the police officer more interested in harassing the leads than solving anything. But this is such a good movie otherwise. It predates the release of Romero's Dawn of the Dead, so it's very unlike the Italian Zombie films that cashed in on the popularity of Romero's film. This one is more a cross between Night of the Living Dead and that other great British zombie film, Plague of the Zombies. Recommended.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#781 Post by domino harvey » Thu Jul 05, 2012 3:17 pm

Mr Sausage wrote:My only complaint is that the film trots out one of my least favourite Italian-horror stock types, the police officer more interested in harassing the leads than solving anything.
Played by five-time Academy Award nominee Arthur Kennedy no less! In his prime he was probably The Greatest, and he's an actor I'll generally watch in anything, but I've been awfully hesitant to witness his late period slide in things like this. Sad to hear he didn't rise above the archetypal material he was given

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#782 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Jul 05, 2012 3:50 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Mr Sausage wrote:My only complaint is that the film trots out one of my least favourite Italian-horror stock types, the police officer more interested in harassing the leads than solving anything.
Played by five-time Academy Award nominee Arthur Kennedy no less! In his prime he was probably The Greatest, and he's an actor I'll generally watch in anything, but I've been awfully hesitant to witness his late period slide in things like this. Sad to hear he didn't rise above the archetypal material he was given
He has more screen presence than one usually finds in these roles, but his performance is hampered by an unconvincing cod-Irish accent. But as far as former Hollywood stars slumming it in Italian genre flicks go, he has a lot less to be embarrassed about than some considering how good this one turns out to be. The schlocky and goofy elements are kept to a minimum.

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#783 Post by swo17 » Thu Jul 05, 2012 4:07 pm

Speaking of Arthur Kennedy horror films...The Window, yes? Or is that more thriller than horror?

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domino harvey
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#784 Post by domino harvey » Thu Jul 05, 2012 4:26 pm

The thriller/horror distinction is a tough one for the purposes of this thread. On first pass I'd say no, but I wouldn't blink if someone put it on their list either

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#785 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Jul 05, 2012 4:31 pm

I’ve always been fond of Let Sleeping Corpses Lie/The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue/Don’t Open The Window/"etc" because of living only a short way from one of the more striking locations in the film, Winnat's Pass, which is that steep road winding between two hills which is used as the location for the church in the film. In reality there is no church at all there, which makes me like the establishing shot showing the church matted into the picture all the more!
Image
The production also must have created that little gate and path that the couple walk up before cutting away to another graveyard location.
Image
I’ve always planned to take some photographs of the pass for comparison purposes, but I think this video of the area rather trumps any pictures that I could take! (He passes over the location where the gate and path for the 'church' were likely built at around the 3 minute mark)

Other than that I do not really recognise too many of the other rural locations, though I've always been amused at the idea of Arthur Kennedy wandering around the Hope Valley ranting in an Irish brogue at the locals and sharing the same screen with a ubiquitous in my childhood Lyons Maid ice cream sign outside one of the local shops!

I agree with Mr Sausage that the best aspects of this film are those frequent moments when the characters disappear out of the frame or are specks inside the countryside and the camera just prowls along hedgerows, watches streams flowing through the frame or swaying grass. It is not just doing the zombie killer point of view thing (though it does that too!) but is also linking into that ecological subplot of the zombies being created by new sonic radiation methods of crop growing. In that sense it is less of a zombie film (at least until the hospital at the end!) and more of a ‘nature fights back’ film, with the reanimated bodies doing nature's revenge work for her! The film has a great score too, full of moans, gasps and sighs.

The one issue that I do have qualms about in the film though is the one brief scene in which our heroine, shaken after encountering the zombies, stops at a local petrol station to get help. When the owner goes off to get help the heroine is approached by the Downs Syndrome daughter with a helpful cup of tea, but our sympathetic female lead freaks out, seeing zombies looming towards her in flash frames, and knocks the cup to the ground. I think I can see what the filmmakers were trying to do here in trying to equate people with Downs Syndrome with the living dead, in the sense of suggesting that there are issues with the way the brain is working (I guess there are also parallels with susceptible developing brains as shown by the zombie baby in the hospital), but it is still a bit of an insensitive scene and perhaps a bit too exploitative!

Other than that (and the slightly tacked-on feeling gore scene of the hospital switchboard operator getting simultaneously groped and eviscerated), I agree that it is quite a neat little film. Though I concede that it could be my nostalgia talking in this case!

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#786 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Jul 05, 2012 5:44 pm

colin wrote:The one issue that I do have qualms about in the film though is the one brief scene in which our heroine, shaken after encountering the zombies, stops at a local petrol station to get help. When the owner goes off to get help the heroine is approached by the Downs Syndrome daughter with a helpful cup of tea, but our sympathetic female lead freaks out, seeing zombies looming towards her in flash frames, and knocks the cup to the ground. I think I can see what the filmmakers were trying to do here in trying to equate people with Downs Syndrome with the living dead, in the sense of suggesting that there are issues with the way the brain is working (I guess there are also parallels with susceptible developing brains as shown by the zombie baby in the hospital), but it is still a bit of an insensitive scene and perhaps a bit too exploitative!
I don't think they were actually going for a comparison between zombies and down syndrome. Thirty seconds earlier she experienced the same thing, where George approaches her out of the fog but she sees a zombie looming at her in a flash POV shot and becomes hysterical. I think we're just meant to feel that her sanity is dissolving from the shocks she's endured.

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#787 Post by swo17 » Fri Jul 06, 2012 12:54 pm

A few dom rex:
domino harvey wrote:Isabel (Paul Almond 1968)...written/produced/directed by Bujold's then-husband, is a stylistically bold film, wherein an alternating, often disorienting editing style is coupled with a hypnotic sound design reliant on clever bridging and carefully composed silences to produce a steady disquiet and unease as the film progresses.
Starting off, it seemed like this might play like an oblique slasher film (with the victim played by the film stock itself!) though it gradually settled into a more deliberate, simmering rhythm. Like L'Annulaire, this is a very good exercise in mood, thrusting you into the life and mind of the protagonist without so much as a roadmap to find your bearings. Though in both cases, I'm only half convinced that I consider the films "horror"--some key ingredients are certainly there, but I'm not sure that that's their primary aim. (I'd call them more psychological dramas with some supernatural and erotic elements.) Though I suppose these are precisely the types of films whose merit as horror films needs to be hashed out here before they can be expected to perform well in the final tally. So anyone willing to stump for them, I'd be curious to hear your case.

More resolutely a horror film to my eyes, and very likely to make my list, is the police training video Surviving Edged Weapons which domino discussed here. (I'm also hosting a copy here.) This is genuinely unnerving and manages to cover the gamut of what a horror film can be--from ridiculously cheesy and OTT fake gore to quite well done and frightening fake gore to meditations on actual violence, including tear-stained interviews with victims. The combined effect of all of this is almost overwhelming to the point that, similar to how I cannot stop obsessively washing my hands ever since seeing Contagion, I am now extremely conscious of all of the potential edged weapons around me. (Like why does my wife just casually leave pairs of open scissors lying on the living room carpet???) So, um, mission accomplished, Canadian police video department. Side note: I love how this is basically an R-rated employment training video (with cursing too!) It never would have occurred to me that such a thing existed.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#788 Post by domino harvey » Fri Jul 06, 2012 5:37 pm

I can only hope that Surviving Edged Weapons spreads through the board, ruining lives one viewing at a time! As for Isabel, I'll concede it falls into a grey area (but I think it's far more defensible than some of the more abstract inclusions people have already bandied about), but it fits my personal definition to a tee-- it creates a world of unease, with a suggestion of supernatural that's stronger and more convincing than, say, in the board's celebrated the Innocents, and the conclusion is suitably horrific from the vantage of sexual and identity politics alone (and take this defense and triple it for L'annulaire)

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#789 Post by knives » Sun Jul 08, 2012 2:29 am

Time for an incoherent ramble because I loved a film so much.
Le Orme
As far as good luck goes the one person here whose work I'm familiar with occupies the same job that's typically the most important in Italian horror cinema (because if that name and the crew didn't tip you off there you go). That's not to say I'm throwing the Auteur theory out the window, but cinematography communicates a lot for these features and with a legend like Vittorio Storaro behind the camera you'd need a giant film to avoid talking about him and even then he'd somehow make it all about himself. The film in general actually becomes a great lesson in making mood exclusively through placement as it's very low budget is shouted very loudly through each frame. Much of the movie is shot on location with the sets looking very artificial, but not in that Hollywood sort of way, but rather unfurnished studio apartment.

Storaro uses all of this to his advantage without once going into the hyper-stylization of early Argento for example. Most of the time he is playing with the depth of field to make this bouncing play against claustrophobia and agoraphobia. The film is entirely shot from interiors and even when the characters leave to an exterior the camera makes it known that the audience is living in spaces. Part of this is a budget thing without question. Early on our lead character gets off a train, moves into a building, and then walks out to talk with a cab driver. All of this is done in one shot giving us a full sense of the location, one which we'll never see again. The budget prevents from any Citizen Kane sort of cut throughs and so to keep all of this information in one shot the camera must stay in one location, but it really doesn't have to be one shot. The first two parts of the shot are completely useless as the final part communicates everything perfectly well and in fact I could easily see the shot even with budget problems in consideration done in a traditional way with close ups and everything rather than leaving the audience distant and isolated lending a chill to an otherwise innocuous situation.

This choice to limit the movement of the camera (it seems to only be able to pivot with zooming and roaming too extravagant an expense) reappears elsewhere and becomes more apparent as the film moves on. It replaces the master shot in many ways as the audience learns the knowledge that cinematography is supposed to lend through these odd extended takes. The film isn't Bretchian in the least and never tries to take the audience out of the experience even if it tries to build that perfect horror mood. So despite all of these little subtle tricks that Storaro employs to frighten and isolate the audience we always feel as if we're watching a regular movie. We get the same information that we would in say a Friday the 13th movie which lends comfort and focus. It's a trick I've seen employed elsewhere particularly with Sirk that keeps the film as 'just entertainment' even as it tries its own personal little experimentations.

The shots even completely in an exterior sets us up in an interior again. So far I've been focusing on the claustrophobia of the film, but the agoraphobia is just as important, perhaps more so since it informs the former quality. There are a handful of sequences that are done in close up. The visual grammar is much the same as in the long shot here with the pivot, but the shots are made more within a montage usually bouncing from a stationary 'spooky' shot and a traveling exposition shot (that is not to say that exposition is necessarily being said, but that this shot is furthering the story). If Storaro is to cut one of the two shots out he will do so to the roving image leaving, usually out of deep focus, the spooky shot. This closes off the film more leaving more or less only the foreground. It comes across almost theatrical and reminds me a little of the more upfront Le Gai savoir in terms of isolating the characters from any surrounding. This makes the images off of the frame disturbed especially since these techniques are usually used to introduce a really horrible character or anything else that will make your stomach feel as if it contained bad oysters. The expanse which has been turned into the unknown chokes the protagonist and the audience. If the outside of the frame is the unknowable and this is a horror movie than the outside is prepared to kill you. You can't take comfort in the interior though as knowledge has only given reason to become more disturbed.

In all of this discussion I've left out how character movement effects these scare tactics and that's mostly because the characters here act as you'd expect in an Italian horror production. To back up and give some information on what I mean it may be good to expose some of the more popular stereotypes of the genre. Well before Japan held the weirdness crown for the english speaking crowd Italians, especially in their horror cinema, seemed to craft art from an other planet with the biggest oddity coming from character interaction or rather the lack of it. Characters become non-reactive moving with the plot and whims of the creators. This might say something special of the culture or artists as it is such a strange element that is true no where else, but it is so pervasive that one must assume that it is accidental genius that often presents itself as poor film making. Somebody could witness a murder or even be violently tortured and in the next scene act as if nothing had occurred with the same set of suspicions being thrown around. That is true here with the difference being just how clearly the film makers show that they are aware of this occurring. I've spoken a lot of Storaro so far, but this aspect really is something the director and writers deserve a pat on the back for. The plot becomes about this cliche with the lead character more or less trapped in the same scene over and over again repeating the same lines and having them repeated back. The absurdity reaches a breaking point before it finally does just that.

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#790 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Jul 08, 2012 3:24 am

knives wrote:The plot becomes about this cliche with the lead character more or less trapped in the same scene over and over again repeating the same lines and having them repeated back. The absurdity reaches a breaking point before it finally does just that.
A nice observation, knives. This conceit is present in Bazzoni's earlier and equally brilliant giallo, La Donna del Lago, where the protagonist's world is increasingly pared down until it inhabits just three spatially isolated locations: the hotel, the cemetery, and the lake. And this restriction in filmic space mirrors the way he becomes trapped inside his own head, continually replaying the same memories, unable either to escape them or decipher and exorcise them. The murder mystery as constriction. In Bazzoni's giallos, memory and identity imprison rather than illuminate or release. By seeking them out, characters just become trapped in an endlessly repeating hell of indeterminacy. With Le Orme, the plot isn't just the same scene repeated over and over, the entire nrrative itself is the main character repeating the exact same weekend and hoping that the overlap will allow her to glimpse her own identity, whatever person she was during that first trip to the hotel. But what she finds does not return her to herself, unifying the narrative; it alienates her from her identity and forces her to relive her (we can guess recurring) nightmare, with a suggestion that she will wake up again without any memory of the events and try to relive them once more. Dream, memory, fantasy, and reality all converge on a single point and become indistinguishable, trapping characters and mocking their attempts to sort out the strands.

Le Orme is a really beautiful mood piece with a solid thematic base. I'm glad you liked it so much and I hope you seek out Bazzoni's other giallos. Two of them are a shoo-in for my list.

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#791 Post by knives » Sun Jul 08, 2012 1:07 pm

I'll definitely check out at least La Donna del Lago. This one really took me by surprise and is unlike most of the Italian horrors I've seen even if it utilizes the expectations created by those films to mess with audience expectations.

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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#792 Post by Mr Sausage » Sat Jul 14, 2012 7:28 pm

Giallos Part 3:

Last one, I promise. This is probably more giallos than is reasonable or healthy, but the thing kind of snowballed on me. I'd find just one more that looked essential, say to myself 'ok, this is the last one,' put it on my rental list and then while waiting for it would find just one more, tell myself the same thing, and put it on my rental list. Repeat for two months. I should know better, but with Italian horror there's this addictive promise of finding that one amazing jewel amidst all the dross, and every new, crazy-sounding title could be it. You can see for yourself how often that worked out. Again, recommended titles in red, list of DVDs to come.


Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll aka House of Psychotic Women (Carlos Aured, 1973): A Spanish giallo. Some would say that means it's not a giallo at all, but I'm not convinced that national identity is a genre marker in this case. Another movie about a killer who likes to steal people's eyeballs. Spanish horror legend Paul Naschy plays a drifter who finds work at a country home inhabited by three disturbed women. Forty-five minutes later (ie. half the film's run-time) a murder occurs and the plot sort of begins. This is probably the most tedious giallo I have ever seen, and that's saying something. It was so boring I couldn't watch it in one sitting, I had to take breaks just to get some relief.

Crimes of the Black Cat aka Seven Shawls of Yellow Silk (Sergio Pastore, 1972): Blind man overhears a sinister conversation in a restaurant and later that night his girlfriend is murdered and a strange yellow shawl left on her body. About the only thing original in this movie is the ridiculous, over-elaborate method the killer uses to dispatch his victims. I won't spoil it since it's part of the mystery, but there is no way it could possibly work this consistently, if at all. The movie even has the cheek to try a shower scene, albeit one that is surprising for its explicit and prolonged violence given that the rest of the film is so tame. And yes, there is a scene where the killer stalks the blind man in his pitch black apartment. Dumb, unoriginal, but kind of entertaining.

Death Carries a Cain (Maurizio Pradeux, 1973): Sadly, this is not a movie about killer geriatrics. It's just one more dull, by the numbers thriller about someone who witnesses a murder and gets caught up in its mystery. I liked the set-up, actually, where a woman using one of those public pay-for-use binoculars you find in tourist cities accidentally sees a cloaked figure murdering a girl in a window. Only she can't figure out what house she's looking at since her view spans across the city. Could've made for some engrossing business, trying to piece together the location of the murder by working over the clues she dimly remembers, but instead the movie takes all of that for granted and just has the police show up announcing they've discovered the house. Things get increasingly stupid and incoherent from there.

Death Laid an Egg (Guilio Questi, 1968): A bewildering giallo by an eccentric director. I'd seen his strange western, Django, Kill!, before, but it's almost orthodox next to this oddity. There is a very basic thriller plot in here, but Questi evidently decided that it wasn't enough to build a whole movie on, so he ignores it in favour of absurdity and formal experimentation. Questi likes to use flash-edits of past and future events intercut with unrelated scenes, and a discontinuous editing style that turns narrative events into abstractions. Everything, dialogue included, seems more symbolic than representational, tho' symbolic of what? Lots of talk about making and remaking people, about people being fragmented parts to be disassembled and reassembled. Plus the usual ennui and passionless romantic couplings. Why is it called Death Laid an Egg? Because it takes place on a high-tech chicken farm. Also, I suspect, because it's poking fun at the genre, but in an oblique kind of way. It doesn't highlight the genre's absurdity, it just takes the genre's usual machinations at face-value and then surrounds them with its own absurd inventions. I can't claim to know what this movie is really up to, but it was fascinating nonetheless.

Death Walks at Midnight (Luciano Ercoli, 1972): Surprisingly entertaining given that I wasn't taken with Ercoli's other giallos. This one marries the drugs-and-guns action-thriller with the giallo in a way that feels organic and gives the plot a certain unpredictability since it doesn't initially let on that this is what's it's up to. Most giallos that try to span genres feel piece-meal, so the consistency and internal logic on display here was unexpected. While on the influence of a hallucinogen our heroine has a vision of a woman being brutally murdered by a man wielding a spike-covered iron glove. Troubles pile up from there, including a menacing stalker. The direction and cinematrography are handsome, with some excellent compositions, especially of bare, over-lit rooms that become quite sinister. But, this being Ercoli, it can't help relying on two of my least favourite Italian genre stock types: the police officer who prefers to be a nuisance than an actual detective, and the heroine who can't get anyone to believe that she's in danger no matter how improbable the counter explanations for her perceived troubles are. Thankfully these aren't relied on as heavily as they tend to be so I can overlook it.

Death Walks on High Heels (Luciano Ercoli, 1971): A kinky European sex thriller, for the first 45 minutes anyway. After the interminable preliminaries the thing finally gets going, with a couple of murders being investigated both by a pair British inspectors doing an unfunny Holmes and Watson parody and by a Frechman playing amateur detective--and by amateur detective I mean he kidnaps and brutalizes possible witnesses, women included, to get information. Did I mention this Frenchman also leeches off his high-priced stripper girlfriend so he won't have to get a job? He shows some remorse for it, but only enough to get drunk off her liquor and berate her, not enough to, you know, get a job. I think he's supposed to be our hero, but it was hard not to cheer when a chemise-clad transvestite kicked the utter shit out of him near the end. Turning him into a human punching bag was by far the best choice this film made. Otherwise, it's an overlong pastiche made from the bits and pieces of all the genre films popular in Italy at the time--giallo, detective film, poliziotteschi, sexploitation, ect.--without too much thought to coherence or integration. The film's elegant visual style belies how unpleasant it is: along with the aforementioned maniacal Frenchman, the film often sexualizes its violence, with the killer running his knife gently over his victim's scantily clad body, provoking terrified gasps and shivers that mimic sexual arousal. As well, the motive revealed to have been behind a notably gruesome and prolonged murder of an attractive woman gave the killer no possible reason to've mutilated her, meaning the lingering violence is entirely for the viewer's pleasure. This one made itself easy to dislike.

Delirium (Lamberto Bava, 1987): There are a couple of interesting stylistic devices to liven things up: whenever the killer appears, normally lit scenes begin to pulsate blue and red, and the victims suddenly become hideous grotesques, like having a single huge eyeball for a face or the head of an insect. There isn't a single reason for this; it's just one of those wacky flights of inspiration Italian genre films often sport. It's a dull movie otherwise, but Lamberto's occasional aesthetic flourishes were very welcome after the spate of creaky, wooden giallos I sat through in the days preceding this viewing.

Eyeball (Umberto Lenzi, 1975): Here is an exercise in redundant structure. A killer whose signature is the removal of the victim's left eyeball targets a tour group in Spain, and only that tour group. Let me summarize the whole movie for you: tour group drives to its destination, one of them is killed, police show up and three or four red herrings are introduced. Repeat for ninety minutes. The biggest surprise is that a giallo called Eyeball wasn't directed by Lucio Fulci. Props to the killer for finding a way to ensure that the same girl was topless both times he chased her. No points for wondering why the police don't suspend the tour and put everyone in protective custody or at least provide an escort, because this is a giallo, and the police in giallos are only there to give the lead a hard time while someone else does their job for them.

In the Folds of the Flesh (Sergio Bergonzelli, 1970): Something to offend everyone! Multiple rapes, incest, necrophilia, bosomy jewish girls being lead naked into a gas chamber in a bizarre black-and-white nazisploitation scene. And in between? Tedium and incoherence.

The French Sex Murders (Ferdinando Merighi, 1972): The film shows a mordant sense of irony when it has an accused murderer sentenced to be guillotined escape from prison, make a high speed getaway on a motorcycle, then decapitate himself by running headlong into a stalled truck. He had earlier placed a curse on everyone in the courtroom, so naturally after his death they drop one-by-one while a distracting Humphrey Bogart look-a-like (and sound-a-like) investigates. Many of the characters are named after characters in Poe's fiction, presumably from a sense of lineage, the giallo being a very Poe-influenced genre. But these allusions remain on the surface. The film has an annoying faux-artistic habit of repeating a single shot from each murder four or five times in succession with different colour filters added in post, just in case we missed that the person was being stabbed (or choked, or decapitated, or whatever). Not a single spark of imagination to be found anywhere.

The House with Laughing Windows (Pupi Avati, 1976): I appreciated this giallo's odd sensibility and its off-kilter approach to this already weird sub-genre. For starters, the set-up is kinda novel: an artist is hired to restore a fresco in a small Italian country church whose original artist died. The fresco is a ghoulish rendition of the death of Saint Sebastian, showing the saint being tortured by two harpy-like women instead of shot full of arrows, and the town is pervaded with an atmosphere of menace and decay. The protagonist is hounded by strange phone calls, the locals refuse to talk about the deceased painter or his painting, and our hero's only friend in town dies mysteriously, sending him on a quest to uncover the mystery behind the artist and his weird painting. One of the movie's strengths is its location shooting. It seems to have been filmed entirely in a real village in the Italian countryside, so the interiors have a run-down, mouldering quality, the exteriors are idyllic and earthy, and the photography is imbued with strong browns and tans that give a slight haze to everything. The atmosphere this lends the movie is palpable and authentic. On top of that, the mystery, especially its resolution, is so bizarre and so over-loaded with perversity that you almost want to applaud the filmmakers for going to such gonzo extremes. It probably goes too far to be effective, but there are some great touches, including a genuinely unsettling audio recording of the dead artist croaking insane babble. Yet the film's novel aspects are weighed down by its heavy use of narrative cliches and its meandering plot. It's way too long considering how little happens, and it has no sense of momentum or direction: it hops around, pursuing avenues, abandoning them, picking them up again, and abandoning them again. It has no sense of how to get where it knows it wants to go (and that's crazy town, believe me). I find that I want to recommend the film for its production design and atmosphere and its balls-out weirdness, but it's just so tedious and lazy, filled with equal parts boring and interesting material. Worth seeing and yet not quite worth a recommendation.

The Killer Must Kill Again (Luigi Cozzi, 1975): A pretty good film. Although it's often labled a giallo, I don't agree that it fits the sub-genre. But I'm not doing a proscriptive guide, so on we go. The movie is a stripped down story of a man who catches a serial killer disposing of his latest victim and offers him money to do the same to his rich girlfriend. Complications ensue. Much of the movie's effectiveness is owed to the rivetting performance of Antoine Saint-John as the killer. The man has one of the most striking faces in cinema history, and he brings a coiled intensity to the movie. There is only one notable flaw in the film, and it's a big one. Late in the movie, a rape scene is intercut with a regular sexual encounter going on at the same time. I don't know what effect the filmmakers were going for, but what ends up happening is the sensuality of the latter is (unintentionally?) carried over into the former, a confusion of tone that has the unpleasant effect of associating positive emotions with a moment that should not have any. I never got the sense that the filmmakers intended the scene as anything other than a bit of button pushing, but it's a misguided choice that nearly sinks the whole film. It recovers, tho', and what you're left with is a fine little thriller with an excellent central performance. Fans of Lisa and the Devil will note that both Eduardo Fajardo and Alessio Orano have roles in the movie.

My Dear Killer (Tonino Valerii, 1972): A superior example of the form. There are few of the bizarre flights of inspiration and the stylistic or narrative oddities that you often find in even sub-par giallos. The movie just takes the basic template and executes it with skill, indeed more skill than most of the generic examples of the form exhibit. It's a good introduction to the sub-genre for that reason. The movie takes care to craft a genuinely intriguing mystery (insurance investigator is murdered in an odd way, and his death comes to be linked with the kidnapping and murder of a ten-year-old girl years earlier). In a sub-genre that often has real trouble making even uncomplicated mysteries coherent, it's nice to see a giallo effortlessly balance all of its elements and ensure that each clue is revealed in a logical manner. What you end up with is an engrossing mystery helped along by an assured pace and several effective and novel murder sequences. The only real flaw is that I'm not convinced the person revealed to be the killer could actually have done many of the things the killer is shown doing. Kind of an oversight, but in a movie like this the slow unravelling of the details and the suggestion they work up in the mind is what's of real interest. It's easy to overlook that the pieces might not fit as well as they should. A surprisingly solid and good baseline example of the giallo.

Orgasmo (Umberto Lenzi, 1969): I've decided I really can't stand scenarios where someone is held against their will, especially if it's by people wearing a constant annoying smirk that's just begging to be smacked off. This is the first of Lenzi's so-called "trilogy" with Carol Baker, which was followed by So Sweet, So Perverse and Paranoia. He made a fourth giallo with Baker, Knife of Ice, so the whole deal makes no sense. Kind of like this movie. A pair posing as brother and sister take up with the newly widowed Baker, seduce her, blackmail her, turn her into an alcoholic, and just all around torment her for obscure reasons. The casual cruelty in this film mounts to such absurd heights that it becomes genuinely comic, which was nice because the thing was otherwise pretty unenjoyable. Everyone, Baker included, does their best to be as annoying as possible. Even the police turn out to be scumbags, tho' the movie doesn't seem to realize it. It's not much of a giallo, either. I'd complain more, but it's my fault for choosing to watch an Umberto Lenzi film in the first place. Speaking of which...

Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (Umberto Lenzi, 1972): A pretty decent effort from Lenzi, much better than the other five of his giallos I've seen. A couple of girls are murdered in quick succession and a crescent moon medallion left on their bodies. One of the intended victims becomes caught up in an investigation that involves who was or was not staying at an Italian resort on a specific day four years prior. The movie isn't particularly suspenseful or exciting, but it executes the investigative elements rather well, enough to be consistently interesting, even if the pieces end up suggesting more than the resolution actually delivers. An unremarkable but very watchable entry.

Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye (Antonio Margheriti, 1973): As if to announce its own derivativeness, here we have both cats and the number seven in the title. Margheriti was primarily a Bava imitator, so this film resembles the giallos of the sixties rather than the Argento-influenced work being done in the early seventies. It's something of a throwback, but for all of its unoriginality it's pretty entertaining. After seeing so many giallos set in urban environments it's nice to find oneself back in a gothic castle among ancestral curses, family secrets, amorous hijinks, scheming, madness, and of course, jewelled lighting. It's all in good fun, and as usual Margheriti has a fine visual sense (even if it's not his).

Slaughter Hotel aka Asylum Erotica aka Cold Blooded Beast (Fernando Di Leo, 1971): So here's a movie about an insane killer loose in a mental institution that decides the best way to use star Klaus Kinski's talents is to cast him as the stuffy level-headed doctor. It's a sign of this movie's general incompetence that the one unexpected thing it does is entirely to its detriment. Mostly this is a softcore porn flick, with patients seducing gardeners, nurses seducing patients, and patients seducing themselves in a couple of surprisingly explicit masturbation scenes. While this goes on, a killer in a ski mask and a cape wanders around breathing heavily and offing whoever happens by. Much as you'd expect from an institution that caters to the suicidal and the insane, the place is filled with open displays of maedieval torture equipment and weaponry, including a loaded(!) cross bow. The killer more or less wanders around at random picking up maces, broadswords, and axes to slaughter people with. This leads to one of my favourite lines in the movie: "look, doctor, a broadsword is missing! Clearly he's still armed!" Considering there isn't a single place easier to arm yourself than this hospital, I'd say just being in the building means he's armed. Missed opportunity to have the killer put on one of the many suits of armour standing about. Couldn't have looked any sillier than his preferred get-up of ski mask and cape. The murder-mystery stuff is beneath perfunctory; you can tell it's just there to kill time between the various sex scenes. Lazy and cheap. Although if you've ever wanted to see a maniac go at a room full of nurses with a mace, this is your movie.

The Sister of Ursula (Enzo Milioni, 1978): There is an emotional undercurrent to this movie of two sisters searching for their lost mother that is genuine. The sisters had been abandoned at an early age, and while Dagmar is well-adjusted, Ursula cannot stand other people and refuses to be touched. Ursula believes that beneath the every-day veneer of regular people lies a void of selfishness and pettiness. The wounds she suffered from her mother's abandonment and her father's aloofness have given her an intense misanthropy that only exacerbates her difficulty connecting. She has built up a wall to keep everyone out, everyone except Dagmar, her lone source of support and companionship. But Dagmar finds Ursula's refusal to change draining, and while she pities her she also resents Ursula's persistent negativity, of which she is frequently the receiver. There is one particularly touching and poignant scene where Ursula kneels in front of a sightless sculpture of Jesus and bitterly asks if his tormentors gouged out his eyes, or if he gouged them out himself so he wouldn't have to see humanity throw itself into the abyss. Dagmar, hearing Ursula reveal the extent of her pain, tries stroke her face out of compassion but is violently rebuffed when Ursula screams once again that she won't be touched. Sound like an interesting movie? Well it's not. All of the above is in there, but it's not what the movie is about. It's about a maniac who fucks girls to death with a giant dildo. So the only interesting and honestly felt thread in this movie is abandoned to the peripheries for more important things like long, superfluous, bordering-on-explicit sex scenes and a killer whose weapon is something you'd only expect to find in a self-aware genre satire. One of the worst giallos I've ever seen just for the sheer amount of disappointment I felt while watching it. We could have had that, but instead we get this? Why?

Spasmo (Umberto Lenzi, 1974): For some reason, realistically painted and anatomically correct female mannikins in various states of undress are lying everywhere in this movie, and they've all been 'murdered': hanged by the neck, stabbed with knives, etc. There is no adequate explanation for it, either. It could've been a fascinating surreal aspect of the movie if it wasn't blatantly and unimaginatively lifted from Mario Bava's films, especially Blood and Black Lace and Hatchet for the Honeymoon. A slow, talky psychological thriller that doesn't contain any thrills or real human psychology. Just a lot of ludicrous tin-earned dialogue and endless twists and turns that finally cause the movie to collapse into incoherence. The cinematography is uncharacteristically excellent, tho'.

Strip Nude For Your Killer (Andrea Bianchi, 1975): There is so much that's god awful about this movie that I thought I'd put it all into a helpful list:
1. Pre-credits abortion scene.
2. Turns out starting at the bottom does not mean the movie can only go up from there.
3. Photographer lures a woman into sex through false pretenses. Afterwards, he refers to her exclusively as 'merchandise,' eg. "this is pretty good merchandise I found, no?" To be fair, she does have the personality of an inanimate object.
4. He's the hero(!).
5. The lovely Edwige Fenech mercifully shows up, but they've given her a really ugly haircut, presumably to limit the possibility of the audience accidentally enjoying themselves.
6. Hairy fat man coerces female character into his car, frightens her half to death with reckless driving, shoos her into his house, then offers to pay her for sex. When she refuses, he tries to rape her; when this doesn't work, he threatens to beat her to death with a sculpture or something if she doesn't take off her clothes.
7. This seems to do it for her because she's suddenly all over him. Fat man can't get it up, tho', and in the midst of weeping declares himself a virgin, which is weird 'cause he's married, though not so weird because he's plainly a fat hairy maniac.
8. Fat hairy and mostly nude maniac dries his tears and waddles to his closet from which he removes a deflated blow-up doll that he caresses while cooing romantic sentences like "you're the only one who does it for me, baby." I contemplate bailing.
9. Killer's signature is to turn on the taps in your house.
10. Why? Because once there was this traumatic moment involving a running faucet whose only witnesses turn out not to be the killer.
11. In order to divert his girlfriend from suspicions she's plainly not entertaining, our hero violently chokes her while threatening her well-being. This strengthens their relationship.
12. The killer is unmasked! And it turns out to be...um, who is that again?
13. Ohhhh, the killer's sister was the one who died at the beginning. Ok, that explains everyth...oh, no, wait, they were lovers as well?! I don't, um...what?
14. Credits.

Watch Me When I Kill (Antonio Bido, 1977): Truthfully, I was hoping this would be terrible so I could just write "No" as my capsule. Turns out it's actually good despite being highly derivative of Argento's work right down to the imitation-Goblin score and the lead who resembles Daria Nicolodi. The focus is as much on the steady piecing together of the mystery as it is on the murders. The secret motivating the killer reaches back to the guilt and trauma of a nation coming out from under World War II. The film is more socially aware than the giallo tends to be, and therein lies its sole claim to originality. It's not the 'who' that matters but the 'why'--the motive has thematic implications for the whole thing while the killer's identity, at least in terms of name and face, hardly matters. So it's rather nice that all the plot threads are wrapped up neatly anyway since they really didn't have to be (and lord knows most giallos don't manage that even when it is necessary). Not great because it's not really Bido's movie, but its resolution puts it above the merely competent entries in this sub-genre, enough to earn it a recommendation.

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knives
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#793 Post by knives » Tue Jul 31, 2012 2:48 pm

Strait Jacket is rather a bore, easily his worst dramatic film. Homicidal though is not just one of his best, but one of the best ever even if the Psycho inspired twist at its least depraved is easy enough to spot. It's the sort of nonsense that wouldn't be out of the realm of De Palma (though I think Castle's real masterpiece isn't available this round. Can't wait until the sci-fi list for that one).

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HerrSchreck
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#794 Post by HerrSchreck » Tue Jul 31, 2012 4:27 pm

domino harvey wrote:[White Zombie (Victor Halperin 1932) Fleetingly presents an interesting idea-- a powerful man driven by sexual jealousy to essentially reduce his love object to an empty sexual prop-- and then devotes almost the entire movie to Lugosi's vamping and creaky rescues and undramatic drama instead. Too bad.
Too bad indeed that this film's charms didn't capture you-- I adore everything about White Zombie. . . it's incredible atmosphere, it's gloomy cinematography (amazing that Martinelli never shot another film that looked like this, nor Halperin himself), it's burning performance by a supercharismatic Lugosi in his primest youthful prime, its gothic sets . . I could go on and on.

White Zombie is actually the first zombie film in history, and to my mind one of the eeriest. Some of the set pieces are just fabulous, particularly the one in the mill where the zombies are pushing the millstone round and round to grind the cane that the zombies above are dumping into the mill-vat. . . and then the dazed, and lifeless automotonlike zombie falls into the vat, and the men below keep forcing the blades round and round . . . and you know the dry bones are cracking and crunching into the mix along with the cane.

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knives
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#795 Post by knives » Tue Jul 31, 2012 4:34 pm

HerrSchreck wrote: White Zombie is actually the first zombie film in history, and to my mind one of the eeriest. Some of the set pieces are just fabulous, particularly the one in the mill where the zombies are pushing the millstone round and round to grind the cane that the zombies above are dumping into the mill-vat. . . and then the dazed, and lifeless automotonlike zombie falls into the vat, and the men below keep forcing the blades round and round . . . and you know the dry bones are cracking and crunching into the mix along with the cane.
Oh yes, while I prefer many other films from the era and my tastes in general lean to the more Hammer side of things that first big scene inside the plantation is totally unforgettable. It's horrifying for how casually its terrors occur. Just the idea of someone being destroyed by a vat while everyone just continues their business feels like a terrible extreme to Metropolis' worker scenes.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#796 Post by domino harvey » Wed Aug 22, 2012 9:24 pm

When a Stranger Calls (Fred Walton 1979) Unsatisfying mashup of the dying post-French Connection cop flick and the still-gestating slasher. The film maintains a fair amount of horror cred due to its opening sequence, a serviceable depiction of the infamous "The call is coming from inside the house" babysitter tale, but any rope given is noosed shortly due to the inordinate amount of time spent on Charles Durning's lowkey vigilante-for-hire antics and the barely-registering presence of the villain. Thank God you don't need to really see this to enjoy the sequel.

When a Stranger Calls Back (Fred Walton 1993) And what a sequel it is! Like the original, this pic opens with a more or less self-contained first act. Yet this sequence is no mere gentile repurposing of a tired urban legend as in the first film, but rather a slow-burning ballet of suspense. A fresh-faced babysitter is placed in familiar territory (home alone, kids asleep) when she hears a knock on the front door. More than that I dare not reveal, except to say that the film utilizes dead space (both visual and aural), long shots, and expertly-placed insert shots within the generous academy frame to add layer upon layer to the snowballing dread. Simply put, the twenty-five minute opening of When a Stranger Calls Back ranks as one of the best (if not the best) examples of this type of horror-suspense, and even if the rest of the film was Troma outtake reels it would still make my list. Thankfully the remainder is pretty good too, with a particularly novel twist concerning the villain's abilities that is so ludicrous it floats by on audacity alone-- keep in mind this film came from the same hand as April Fool's Day, so Walton must get a real kick out of these sort of things!

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zedz
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#797 Post by zedz » Wed Aug 22, 2012 11:13 pm

Was When a Stranger Calls Back made for TV? It seems really weird that it would be academy ratio otherwise.

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knives
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#798 Post by knives » Wed Aug 22, 2012 11:19 pm

Yes it was.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#799 Post by domino harvey » Sat Aug 25, 2012 9:31 pm

Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland 2009) --Swo17 Spotlight-- I grew weary of the film's reiterations of Euro art house cliches in the first half, but low expectations were raised by the titular character's eventual encounter with her rapist.
SpoilerShow
It's in this twenty minute block that the film contributes winningly to the Rape Revenge subgenre, with Varga's conflicted response to her affable rapist and his appealing home life ultimately nulling her ill-formed revenge.
It's an interesting footnote to a questionable subgenre, but unfortunately the film eventually wanders back over to the dark side of affectated ambiguity in its finale. You can keep your $10, Swo, but maybe check out my Spotlights if you want our account squared.

Kill Baby, Kill! (Mario Bava 1966) Still not quite on board the Bava train, but I can see the appeal in a product like this. As in much of Italian horror I've seen for the project, the plot doesn't make much sense, but there are a few decent creative flourishes (like the doctor who ends up chasing himself!) to ease the pill.

Le Orme / Footprints (Luigi Bazzoni 1975) --Dylan Spotlight--
SpoilerShow
I am just so tired of the "heroine going insane" genre trope.
Sister Sister (Bill Condon 1987) Surprisingly effective Gothic melodrama concerning Jennifer Jason Leigh's sexual immaturity as filtered through varying stages of concealed victimhood. Leigh is as ever a national treasure and the best thing here, but the film surrounds her with an effective murder mystery that unravels with a winningly hammy eagerness in the final act. Condon links sex with some form of transgression throughout, creating a compelling and novel track of suppressed Southern sexuality wherein the orgasmic release of life ultimately can only be ushered in by the dead!

the Video Dead (Robert Scott 1987) No doubt I've used the word "amateurish" elsewhere in this thread, but I should have kept it pocketed for a case like this. What a confused and cheap mess this film is, with an occult TV inadvertently unleashing first year makeup class zombies and bar sluts onto unsuspecting suburban masses. The film attempts to mask its budget in manic editing choices, but Sam Raimi this ain't. The heroine eventually defeats her undead tormentors by throwing them a dance party, and that even that sucks is damnation aplenty.

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tarpilot
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Re: The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Projec

#800 Post by tarpilot » Sat Aug 25, 2012 9:44 pm

Have you seen Blood and Black Lace, dom? It was one of my main entry points to both Bava and the giallo years ago, and it remains one of the highlights of each for me. Definitely a bit tighter narratively than the gialli that would immediately follow, and it absolutely set the genre's stylistic bar with what Sausage referred to as its vision of "the murder-mystery as phantasmagoria". I also imagine Tim Lucas's excellent commentary would provide some valuable insight for the unconvinced.
Last edited by tarpilot on Sat Aug 25, 2012 10:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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