Friday, March 15, 2024

Female Trouble

The Sniper (Edward Dmytryk, 1952)

Always a surprise whenever a film from the past subverts any preconceived notions you hold for a particular era in cinema. Edward Dmytryk's chilling film noir, The Sniper (1952), is one of those types of films. Much like James Landis's The Sadist (1963) being the spiritual predecessor to films like Terence Malick's Badlands (1973) and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1997), The Sniper's Eddie Miller (Arthur Franz) comes across as a precursor to Norman Bates and Frank Zito.

Dmytryk's thriller largely focuses on its antagonist, a violent misogynist working as a dry cleaning deliverer. Miller is an ace shot with a rifle and ever since his release from a prison psychiactric ward, he's been resisting the urge to pull the trigger on various women who have crossed his path. Here's the interesting thing: he wants to be stopped.

What finally pushes him over the edge and turns him into a killer is when he's friendzoned by a bar musician, Jean Darr (Marie Windsor), who, after asking for a special favour from him regarding an emergency dry clean, scurries him out of her apartment when her boyfriend arrives. This results with one of the most disturbing moments of the film, when she's callously shot in the head after leaving her work.

There isn't a clear cut protagonist in The Sniper to counterbalance Eddie Miller's deranged killings; instead we're provided with various characters who might have played the part if they were give enough screen time. Adolphe Menjou is perhaps the closest to one, however, as the elderly Police Lt. Frank Kafka (I'm not joking). There's also a very late introduction of a young criminal psychiatrist played by Richard Kiley, who hardly gets to do much, other than reveal the film's liberal social message; intervention and reform from a young age.

Given its plot of a serial killer armed with a sniper rifle, and the fact that it's set in San Francisco, I can't help but think that The Sniper must have been an inspiration to Don Siegel's classic seventies thriller Dirty Harry (1971). Obviously, the major differences being the latter features a gigachad protector played by the legendary Clint Eastwood. It also contains a more conservative message; criticising the legal system that protects a suspected menace with its bureaucratic red tape. Dmytryk's takes a far more liberal and compassionate view in this regard.

Genuinely surprised a film with such a dark subject matter would ever be released by a Hollywood studio — particularly Columbia Pictures. What would have been more fitting as a low-budget exploitation film produced by the likes of B-movie legend, George Weiss back in the day, is a highly polished and thoroughly thrilling Stanley Kramer production. Thus, The Sniper is not only an excellent film noir, but a serial killer film which might have been ahead of its time.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Pisces of the Puzzle

Andre Nickatina - I'm a Pisces
Cocaine Raps album, 1997

Managed to finally solve the final piece recently in a doubly perplexing puzzle which consisted of two samples used on Andre Nickatina's rap song, I'm a Pisces.

Identifying their origins became something of an obsession ever since I first heard the song on an ancient rap forum. Had a hunch they were both sourced from films, but I was never 100% sure, however. Turns out I was right after all these years:

Bernard Herrmann - Cobra Dance
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad OST, 1958
 

Chanced upon randomly watching The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) on TV many years ago and hearing Bernard Herrmann's Cobra Dance was a eureka moment. The music in question occurs during the scene where the villainous sorceror, Sokurah, melds a handmaiden in a giant clay vase with a cobra, like a progenator to the Brundlefly. With the aid of Ray Harryhausen's ace stop-motion mastery, the snake woman dances before the sultan's royal court. Knew this wasn't some obscure song from a far off continent, but taken from a vintage Hollywood film. Took some years to finally realise it, though.

Death Journey (Trailer)
Fred Williamson, 1976
 

Would have loved it if the vocal sample from the start of the song was a similar discovery to the one above, but this was a lot more straight forward - Googling! Yes, it took decades until your host realised he could do a simple Google search. Lo and behold it turned out to be from a Fred Williamson film called Death Journey (1976). The dialogue in question appears at 58 minutes and 21 seconds into the film, but you can hear a part of it in the trailer, too. Thus, the final piece in the puzzle which has antagonised the little grey cells for so long has finally been laid to rest.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

To the Devil a Trailer

Late Night With the Devil (Trailer)
Cameron Cairnes & Colin Cairnes, 2024


The Phillippou Brothers weren't the only siblings hailing from Australia with a horror film in 2023. Unfortunately, Cameron and Colin Cairnes's Late Night With the Devil (2023/2024) wound up doing the festival route while Talk to Me (2022/2023) found distribuition via wunderlabel A24 and subsequently became one of the highlights that year.

A trailer has recently been unveiled. No doubt the Cairnes Brothers are hoping for similar success with their seventies throwback to late night television. For the Brits out there, the film's premise strikes comparison with the supernatural spectacle of Ghostwatch (1992). The very reason this blipped its way on the blog's radar in the first place. 

The underrated David Dastmalchian as the late night talk show host, Jack Delroy, is a major plus as he's always been a "that guy" in his scene stealing minor roles. Dastmalchian's Polka-Dot Man was also one of the reasons The Suicide Squad (2021) proved be one of the few good comic books movies in recent years. This all makes Late Night With the Devil something of a must watch for your host, hopefully it lives up to its potential.

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Quest for Misfire

Out of Darkness (Andrew Cumming, 2022/2024) 

Stuck for two years in the film festival quagmire, Andrew Cumming's prehistoric survival horror Out of Darkness (2022) unearths its way to the general public with a new title (PKA The Origin) and the final result is it should have stayed in the bog.

Set in 43,000 B.C, Out of Darkness begins with a small tribe landing on the shores of an undiscovered land; somewhere in ancient Europe. Tension soon replaces elation when our Paleolithic collective soon discover that they're not alone in the hostile wilderness. At first, it's the suspicious demise of a mighty beast, then it's the sounds from the darkness beyond their campfire. When one of the party is snatched into the blackness of night, the horror elements of the film really come into play.

What sells the film is its premise; this isn't just another one of those fish out of water stalk and slash type films, but one that's set in the prehistoric past, where its characters are familiar with survival. The other selling point is the unique language created for the film that's spoken by its cast. That's the good out of the way.

The problems of the film become abundantly clear with its typically modern and generic story telling. That's all well and good in your average Star Wars or MCU shite, but it's immersion breaking in a film which has taken some effort striving for authenticity with creating an ancient language. Why on Earth would a writer feel compelled to point out how awful the patriarchy is in a caveman horror thriller? Wouldn't be surprised if the writers gave themselves a pat on the back when they named two of the film's characters Adem and Avé. These eye rolling, cringe worthy faux pas would have been forgiven if Out of Darkness did not have one of the most reprehensible girl boss protagonists to ever grace a film since Odessa A'zion's Riley in Hellraiser (2022). Capping it all off, the film ends with an underwhelming final act revelation containing a glib social message en par with Robert Kerman's "I wonder who the real cannibals are" from Cannibal Holocaust (1980).

Worth noting that the Scottish Highlands look fantastic in the film and really drive home its ancient setting. It's all a huge shame as the cast are generally good, particularly Kit Young as the young Geirr. Also, I can't really hate on Safia-Oakley Green as the girl boss Beyah, either; hardly her fault her character was written so poorly. If only this film was produced around the same time of the classic subterranean horror The Descent (2006), which also contained cavemen of a sort. The film wouldn't have fallen victim to such modern day unnecessary distractions like its menstruating girl boss protagonist worrying about her toxic tribal chief stripping her of her virginity amidst the unknown entity which is stalking them.

Funny thing about Out of Darkness's general negative reception is the criticism over it containing a diverse multi-ethnic tribe, Gucci looking fur clothes and shaved faces ruining their perceptions of prehistory. None of those were an issue for me. They might very well be anachronistic (who really knows, am I right?), but they were far more tolerable than the Tumblrina levels of writing. Besides, the best caveman film is Don Chaffey's One Million Years B.C. (1966) which was blessed with the iconic Raquel Welch and dinosaurs (courtesy of the legendary Ray Harryhausen) that were already extinct when our ancestors first walked the Earth:

One Million Years B.C. (Trailer)
Don Chaffey, 1966

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Viewings: February 2024

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is not only the pick of the month, it’s also the highest rated film from the 2020s I've awarded since the blog’s creation. 

Other recent hightlights were Gianfranco Giagni's obscure, Italian horror gem The Spider Labyrinth and Don Medford's bitterly bleak The Hunting Party.

 

Film:

The Ghost Train (Walter Forde, 1941)*

The Secret Cinema (Paul Bartel, 1966/1968)*

The Hunting Party (Don Medford, 1971)*

The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman (León Klimovsky, 1971)*

The Crazies (George A. Romero, 1973)

Boss Ni**er (Jack Arnold, 1974)*

The Bitch (Gerry O’Hara, 1979)*

The Spider Labyrinth (Gianfranco Giagni, 1988)*

They Live (John Carpenter, 1988)

Carlito’s Way (Brian De Palma, 1993)

Self Catering (Robin Lefèvre, 1994)

Belly 2: Millionaire Boyz Club (Ivan Frank, 2008)*

Open Graves (Álvaro de Armiñán, 2009)*

Divinity (Eddie Alcazar, 2023)*

Dario Argento Panico (Simone Scafidi, 2024)*

Out of Darkness (Andrew Cumming, 2022/2024)*

Night Swim (Bryce McGuire, 2024)*

The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023/2024)*


Television:

Doctor Who - Various Episodes (Sydney Newman, 1963 - 2023)*

Mastermind - Episodes 23 - 26 (Bill Wright, 2023/2024)*


*First time viewings.


Dada Debaser Notes:

  • For decades I've wondered if Richard France from The Crazies (1973) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) was the voice on the intro to Dr. Dre's Lyrical Gangbang. Still not sure.
  • Night Swim is a contender for one of the worst films released this year already. The latest example of a short film that should not have been turned into a feature length.
  • Shout out to all the blind buyers who copped the boutique blu-ray of the lo-fi, B&W, sci-fi borefest Divinty when they should have checked out LOLA instead. I did like the Kool Keith song from it, however.
  • Other than they sound completely different, you can tell another actor was used to narrate the Game's character in the awful Belly sequel as he wasn’t name dropping anyone.
  • Went film detective trying to identify a TV movie I watched back in the day where John Gordon Sinclair was cooked and eaten. Turned out to be Self Catering and still on Channel 4's website.
  • Can’t believe people risked their lives during the Blitz to watch humourless Arthur Askey comedies.
  • Nearly forty years after Opera (1987) and Cristina Marsillach is almost reduced to tears when reminiscing over her experience with Dario Argento in the latest documentary about him. Feeling the same way about Asia Argento's awful tattoos, to be honest.
  • On paper, The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman has all the elements I look for in a great Paul Naschy film, but it pales in comparison to its quasi-remake, The Night of the Werewolf (1981).

And finally:

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Night School

Exploitica/Exploitica Rides Again - Curfew Breakers!
Channel 4 Television, 1999 - 2000

An unsung gem of late night TV was the short lived Channel 4 show Exploitica. In a similar vein to MST3K, the show mocked various B- Movies of the past, but with its own indelible British humour; often as problematic as the films it ridiculed.

Much like Moviedrome, Exploitica, and its second season, retitled to Exploitica Rides Again, would serve as film school for devotees of psychotronic cinema. Material was ofteen sourced from Something Weird's legendary back catalogue like The Violent Years (1956). Also, the show wasn't afraid to laugh at sacred genre cows like Deep Red (1975), either. Its lampooning of various educational/propaganda films from the past, was another reason why the show hit all the right notes for me.

Sadly, its dedicated and ancient YouTube channel appears to have even less clips available than I last visited it; maybe it's due to licensing and ownership issues. Feeling a lot like Roy Batty in Blade Runner whenever I get nostalgic over this classic late night show - all those moments will be lost in time.

Exploitica/Exploitica Rides Again - The Violent Years
Channel 4 Television, 1999 - 2000

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Nobody Beats the Riz

Having heard Riz Ortolani's theme from the very downbeat The Hunting Party (1971) for the first time recently, makes this a good opportunity to list some other joints I dig from the composer. Despite scoring soundtracks for some notorious films from the world of cinema, his music has often been a universal positive to soundtrack heads like myself.

I Giorni Dell'ira / Day of Anger (1967)

Miami / Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971)

Il Ricordo di Serena / Confessions of a Police Captain (1971)

Web of the Spider / Web of the Spider (1971)

Seven Bloodstained Orchids / Seven Bloodstained Orchids (1972)

Cyclone / Cyclone (1978)

Il Corpo di Linda / The Pyjama Girl Case (1977)*

Adulteress Punishment / Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

Roma Imperial Rock / Warriors of the Year 2072 (1984)

Riz Ortolani - Do It To Me
House on the Edge of the Park OST, 1980

Fave Ortolani cut will always be Do It To Me off  Ruggero Deodato's thoroughly mean-spirited nasty House on the Edge of the Park (1980), which was hilariously titled wrong in the film and its trailer. It's been a disco themed earworm that could have played at Fontaine Khaled's swanky London club back in the day. The song being associated with the most amusing scene from House on the Edge of the Park, before things go very sour for its uppity class party hosts, is probably another reason, too.

* Other than Il Corpo di Linda, the soundtrack to The Pyjama Girl Case is ruined by French singer Amada Lear sounding like a heavily sedated Marlene Dietrich struggling to remain conscious and in tune. If only the much preferred trailer music was included instead as it knocks, before Lear’s awful song plays near the end. No idea if Ortolani was responsible for it, though.

Friday, February 23, 2024

House of Glazer

The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023/2024)

Jonathan Glazer's long awaited film, The Zone of Interest, a loose adapatation of Martin Amis's titular novel, is a powerful viewing experience. Horrific atrocities that occur in the film are largely implied, heard and viewed from afar. Therefore, much of the horror is left to our imagination. Adjacent to the unseen nighmare, we're privvy to the domestic life of  Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, living next door to "the zone of interest" with his family.

Witnessing the commandant's family living with complete apathy right next to what can be best described as Hell is what makes this an incredibly powerful and chilling film. Höss isn't portrayed as some completely deranged pyschopath making it easy to differentiate from. He behaves like a normal individual towards his family; even feeling sad for his horse who he needs to leave behind due to work commitments. That's what makes this such a compelling experience; what appears like a normal individual being capable of committing monstrous actions. Two scenes which really highlight this is where he's having a mundane chat in bed with his wife, Hedwig, about a possible vacation in Italy, and it's immediably followed by a close shot of him overseeing prisoners being processed after their arrival at the death camp. The sounds are truly distressing and haunting. Not something that will be easy to forget any time soon.

Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller), the matriarch of the family, is also complicit with the horror. She takes extreme pride of her dream home. She even considers herself  "the Queen of Auschwitz", claiming that she would have to be dragged away the paradise she lives in. Her staff, work in abject fear. One of whom bearing the burden of Hedwig's annoyance is threatened with, "I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice." Chilling. There are hints throughout the film that Hedwig came from poverty and is of a low class. Prisoners' personal belongings are amusingly said to come from "Canada" by Hedwig and her friends. Her callousness is spawned from the jealousy and resentment she harboured before fascism gave her and her family prosperity.

Smoke from steam engines carrying its human victims can be seen from the walled perimeter of the Höss's home. The dark and acrid smoke from the crematorium chimney can be observed both day and night. It's the final straw during a restless night for Hedwig's visiting mother. She realises that her former employer, Esther Silberman, might have suffered a horrific fate on the otherside of the wall. Ash is mixed with top soil by a prison labourer in the commandant's garden. The flowers looks beautiful. These sequences respectfully allow the audience to fill in the gaps.

Sound is integral to the film's disturbing atmosphere. Our eyes might not witness the horror, but our ears ghive some insight with what might be occuring offscreen. Barking guard dogs, crackfire from a gun and the screams of helpless people are very harrowing. The ghastly gutteral sound of furnaces at work is also unsettling. These are all ambient sounds in the background of the Hoss family dream home. What's more, it's the norm for the children. Claus the oldest son, a collector of gold teeth, has fun at the expense of his younger brother, Hans, by locking him in the greenhouse and mockingly making the sound of hissing gas. It's rather obvious, the children know exactly what is going on beyond the proximity of their grounds.

Micha Levi's soundtrack also plays a huge part. It's minimal, and otherwordly modern, but complimentary and never out of place. Glazer bravely begins the film by focusing on nothing but a black screen for a few minutes. Once the viewer begins to adjust to the cinematic depravation, a haunting choral and a strained string arrangment can be heard in the darkness. It's followed by chirping birds and other familar woodland sounds, before the opening shot of the Höss family enjoying a day out by a picturesque lake. 

While sound plays such a large part, visually, it's a stunning looking film. For such a horrific event in history, everything looks sharp with some superb composition. High resolution close-up shots of various flora in the garden show beauty all while you're hearing the horrors past the garden wall. Another example of the contrasts Glazer utilises in the film. Certain scenes involve a young Polish girl placing apples and various other food around a construction site in the darkness of night for the starving prisoners to eat. These moments are shot with the aid of thermal vision cameras. The effect looks ultra modern and somewhat alien for a period piece, but it works remarkably well within the context of the film. 

Always annoying when all the wannabe Eberts, all-access shills, culture journos narcissists spew massive heaps of praise towards undeserving films. Words like "classic" and "masterpiece" are often unwarranted and used far too liberall. Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest exemplifies these two descriptions during a time when they had real value. This is a tough and harrowing film to watch, but a supremely powerful story in modern cinema.

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

The Long Ranger

The Hunting Party (Don Medford, 1971)

With the likes of  The Great Silence (1968), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968 )and The Wild Bunch (1969) trailblazing a morally grey and violently grittier direction for the Western, the seventies proved to be a decade where the genre would swing to various extremes: from slapstick comedy to supernatural horror, to pessimistic nihilism. Don Medford's The Hunting Party (1971) would be one of the films which opted for the latter.

You're in for a tough and unapologetic Western when it cold opens with a real life scene of a cow having its throat cut. If that isn't shocking enough, it's intercut with Candice Bergen being raped by her sadistic husband played by Gene Hackman. Calamity Jane this ain't. While Hackman is away on a hunting trip (which involves torturing an Asian prostitute) with his rich pals, Bergen is kidnapped by a permanently perspiring Oliver Reed (still rocking the Urbain Grandier look) and his gang of outlaws, where she's also raped by him. There really are no good guys in this film, in case you were wondering. The outlaw posse is oblivious to who her powerful and sadistic husband is and only snagged Bergen to teach Reed how to read.

The outlaws are at a distinct disadvantage to Hackman's hunting party since they're picked off from afar with the aid of very long range rifles. This leads to some absolutely horrific and dishonourable killings, including one person slain whilst taking a dump. As the film progresses, both men exhibit their stubborn ignorance in recognising the self-destructive paths they’re headed. Thus, it’s generally a downbeat affair as far as Westerns go. The one moment of light relief is the brief peaches scene highlighting the blossoming Stockholm Syndrome between Bergman  and Reed.

This is a morally grey film with no real heroes... anywhere. Hackman is the films villain. Bergen is nothing more than a trophy wife to him; her abduction is seen as a slight upon his manhood rather than motive to rescue her. To add further to this, Bergen’s feelings for her captor is makes her another target in Hackman’s sights. On the morality scale, 'good' is completely absent. In one notable scene where Hackman wastes away various outlaws upon a bell tower, Bergen yells for Reed to take her with him while making a getaway. This wounds Hackman's  pride even further; spurring him even to follow the pair through a desert during the film's memorable downbeat finale.

Outside of television work, Don Medford only helmed one other theatrical film, The Organisation (1971), which was the third entry in the Virgil Tibbs movies with Sidney Poitier - also released in the same year. A shame really, as the downbeat Corbucci veneer would have been a perfect fit for the rest of the nihilistic seventies. There's also Riz Ortolani's superb theme furthering the strong Spaghetti Western influence on the film.

Definitely not a film for everyone, in fact, it isn’t an understatement to consider The Hunting Party as a highly offensive film for today's sensibilities. Definitely not for a "modern audience". Personally, I was hooked by this bleak Western; its virtual two hour run time flew by, it was that engrossing. It's possibly in the same league as Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent's notoriously violent Cut-Throats Nine (1972) and Lucio Fulci's utterly miserable The Four of the Apocalypse... (1975) as far as depressing Westerns go. That lot make The Great Silence look like Way Out West (1937) by comparison, but The Hunting Party is better than either of those. Worth checking this out for Hackman’s and Reed’s performances; particularly the latter, as it was his one and only Western.

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Picks of 2014

Despite not caring for critical and popular favourites like Birdman, Whiplash, John Wick and Gone Girl, 2014 was still a very strong year for your host: it was a great mix of domestic and international releases; a healthy balance of mainstream and independent titles; incredible directorial debuts from Jennifer Kent, Dan Gilroy and Ana Lily Amirpour. Even Wes Anderson made a film that I enjoyed. Crazy!

'71 (Yann Demange)

 Alléluia (Fabrice Du Welz)

As Above, So Below (John Erick Dowdle)

The Babadook (Jennifer Kent)

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves)

The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland)

Frank (Lenny Abrahamson)

The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour)

Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn)

The Guest (Adam Wingard)

It Follows (David Robert Mitchell)

Kingsman: The Secret Service (Matthew Vaughn)

The Lego Movie ( Phil Lord & Christopher Miller) 

Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy)

Paddington (Paul King)

The Purge: Anarchy (James DeMonaco) 

The Raid 2 (Gareth Evans)

The Rover (David Michôd)

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller)

Spring (Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson)

Starry Eyes (Kevin Kolsch & Dennis Widmyer)

The Taking of Deborah Logan (Alan Robitel)

What We Do In the Shadows (Taika Waititi & Jemaine Clement)

Wild Tales (Damián Szifron)

Wolf Creek 2 (Greg McLean)

Revisiting It Follows last month was a reminder how I still don't own what's arguably the best film soundtrack of the 2010s:

Disasterpeace  - Title
It Follows OST, 2014