horror

Movie of the Month: Blood and Black Lace (1964)

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Every month one of us makes the other two watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made James & Brandon watch Blood and Black Lace (1964).

Britnee:
Mario Bava’s celebrated Italian thriller, Blood and Black Lace, is a landmark in horror cinema and one of the earliest giallo films in existence. It’s also considered to be the first “body count” horror film, so we can thank Bava for all of those campy, raunchy 80s slasher flicks. Watching this film is like taking a walk through an art gallery. It’s chock-full of rich colors, eerie scenery, deep shadows, and impressive camera angles. The outstanding cinematography alone is a good reason to watch the film. I have a special place in my heart for this Bava masterpiece and I’m so thrilled to present it as April’s Movie of the Month.

Blood and Black Lace is set at a fashion salon in Rome that is full of beautiful, young models, but there are quite a few secrets hiding beneath all of their glamour and charm. The models begin to be brutally murdered by a faceless killer (once a very important diary goes missing) and when I say brutal, I mean brutal. These gruesome murder scenes are very bold and in-your-face, which was not very common for films in 1964, but the murder scene shots are executed in such a way that they are breathtakingly gorgeous. After re-watching the film with the Swampflix crew, I realized how the models in the film were more like movie props than actual characters, much like the multicolored mannequins they were surrounded by in the salon. They lacked personality and character development, but I think that’s something that Bava did intentionally.

Brandon, do you agree that the ill-fated models were merely props? If so, what do you think Bava was attempting to convey by doing this?

Brandon:
What are models if not moving, breathing mannequins? I think you’re absolutely right to believe Bava was drawing that connection. Aside from their individual reactions to the discovery of the first victim’s diary, there isn’t much to distinguish one model from another outside their looks. The fact that he chose fashion modeling as the movie’s backdrop in the first place is not only calling attention to the fact that most of the movie’s charms are in its stylistic flairs, but also that the characters are mere mannequins in motion, personality-free objects meant to put Bava’s visual fashion on display. Even the film’s killer, whose face is entirely flat & featureless, is used as a prop here. The killer’s look is about as close to a mannequin as one could get. Bava makes no bones about the fact that his characters are there as both plot devices & living, breathing decoration.

As much as I would like to argue that he made the female characters especially featureless as a comment on sex politics (this is a world where it’s totally cool to call your lover a “little idiot” after all), I believe there’s a much simpler explanation for the women’s lack of character development: misdirection. The 50 years of murder mysteries that followed Blood and Black Lace may have somewhat prepared us as a modern audience for the final couple of twists at the end of the film, but Bava does pull off a clever bit of misdirection with his characters. By leaving the women somewhat blank (although they are awfully interested in that diary) he allows them to fade into the background a bit, never to be considered as suspects in the murders. Later, when the murders continue despite the male characters all being jailed at once it feels like a shock that a woman might be involved. And then it gets even more confusing when the most likely female suspects begin to drop off like flies. Blood and Black Lace may be rightfully remembered most for its intense visual style, which heavily influenced many giallo films to come, but its central mystery cannot be completely discounted as a major draw to the film.

James, do you think that Bava finds a good balance between paying attention to the film’s whodunit murder mystery & its visual eccentricities, or does one overpower the other?

James:
I definitely think that Bava’s visual style overshadows the movie’s central murder mystery but agree with Britnee that this was mostly intentional. The long tracking shots, oblique camera angles, and lurid lighting choices were, for me, far and away the most noteworthy aspects of the film, with the police procedural and central mystery seeming secondary. Although, it must be noted that the effective twist ending does make up for some of that. As I dug around for information on the influential director, I came across this quote that confirms that Bava felt the same way. In regards to Blood and Black Lace, Bava was “bored by the mechanical nature of the whodunit and decided to deemphasize the more accepted cliches of the genre”.

Instead of developing complex characters or an intricate plot that was central to these kind of films in the past, Bava focused on pushing the genre to its limits by stepping outside the accepted boundaries of sex and violence. This seems to further the case that Bava not only invented giallo films, but also slasher flicks, which are basically whodunnits with lots of murder and sex. Blood and Black Lace has plenty of both and what I really appreciated about the film was how it mixed these lowbrow, sensationalist tendencies with high art, something Dario Argento was a master at as well.

Britnee, what do you think of the way Bava mixes lowbrow with highbrow?

Britnee:
Personally, I think Bava did an exceptional job making the film’s uncultured components ultra chic and sophisticated. Blood and Black Lace is a refined slasher flick that pairs well with fine wine and fancy cheeses. When I first viewed the film, I couldn’t figure out why the production was so classy and not the sloppy, morbid mess that I expected it to be. Now, I have a much better idea of the reason why this film is so tasteful. The choices that Bava made for the visual aspects of the film transforms what could’ve been a just another crude horror movie into a literal piece of art.

Speaking of visuals, color plays such an important role in Blood and Black Lace. I noticed that there is a particular color that is prominent with some of the victims, and the color is present in the lighting, props, costumes, etc. For example, Tao-Li wears a lot of white clothing and is killed wearing white lingerie in an all-white bathroom. We didn’t really intend to have our Movie of the Month choices connect with one another, but there is a definite connection between The Masque of the Red Death and Blood and Black Lace when it comes to the color-coding that takes prominence in each film. I don’t believe that The Masque of the Red Death film had any impact on Blood and Black Lace because both films were released in 1964, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the colored rooms in Poe’s famous tale influenced Bava’s masterpiece.

Brandon, since you are the expert on The Masque of the Red Death, I was wondering what you thought of this connection? Is there even a connection between the two films at all?

Brandon: Like you said, the two works were released more or less as contemporaries so it’s less likely that one influenced the other and more just a coincidence that both Corman & Bava had an intense interest in rich, saturated color schemes. It’s obviously possible that Bava could have been influenced by Poe’s classic tale (I know that one was a stand-out favorite for me as a teen, even when it was assigned reading in countless English classes), but the connection might be more simple than that. By the mid-60s Technicolor film prints had more or less fallen out of fashion with major studios (because of the time & money involved, if nothing else) but both Masque & Black Lace are holding on to the saturated color associated with the Technicolor technique. Once a practical process used to bring vibrant color to early films, Technicolor was later used by Bava & Corman, among others, as more of an artistic aesthetic.

Bava’s exploitation of the rich color of Technicolor prints was put to great artistic effect in horror classics like Blood and Black Lace, The Whip and The Body, and Planet of the Vampires. It’s a stylistic choice that not only visually connects it to The Masque of the Red Death, but also establishes it as an early touchstone of the giallo genre. It’s not at all surprising that one of the final Technicolor transfers was used by Bava-descendent/giallo legend Dario Argento to produce his best known film, Suspiria. Bava’s attention to color in Blood and Black Lace is echoed through almost every giallo film that followed it, especially in Argento’s work.

James, besides the rich, saturated colors in Blood and Black Lace, what other elements of the film do you see passed down to the giallo movies that followed it?

James: The technical aspects of Blood and Black Lace are the easiest to spot in the gaillo films that followed. Dizzying cinematography, off kilter camera angles, bizarre framing, and violent close ups are used almost universally by other gaillo filmmakers, though few apply the surreal art house flair so effectively as Bava and Argento. I suspect Bava’s art house tendencies are also the reason for the film’s disorienting, somewhat disjointed murder mystery, another element I’ve seen in a genre that focuses more on style than plot and character development. Blood and Black Lace‘s lurid mix of eroticism and horror has also influenced countless films in and outside of the gaillo genre, the paranoia surrounding a masked killer preying on beautiful women being a recurring theme in gaillo and slasher/splatter movies of the 70s and 80s.

Lagniappe

Brandon: The one thing I’m surprised we didn’t touch on yet was the music in the film. Although the stylistic violence, the mentions of cocaine abuse, and the intrigue of the murder investigations suggest a morbid affair, the score relies on a very swanky brand of lounge music that makes the movie feel a lot goofier than it would look on paper. The disparity between the swanky score & the severity of the plot is apparent from the get-go, with the actors/characters being introduced in the opening credits as if they’re starring in a particularly violent 60s TV show about police investigations instead of a proto-slasher art film. It eventually fades into some more mood-appropriate chamber music late in the film, but the generally lighthearted nature of the Blood and Black Lace‘s soundtrack is just as strange of a detail as its brutal-for-its-era violence or Bava’s penchant for saturated colors in his lighting.

Britnee: Blood and Black Lace is really all about the visuals. Ingenious camera work and the innovative use of vivid colors steal the show and outshine all other aspects of the film. The plot isn’t horrible by any means, but it’s definitely not the backbone of this movie. Actually, I enjoyed the weak plot because it draws more attention to the film’s groundbreaking visual elements, and this serves as a reminder that there’s more to a film than just its storyline. Kudos to Bava for being brave and thinking outside of the box.

James: Considering that Blood and Black Lace was released in 1964, I don’t think it’s an overstatement to call the movie groundbreaking. The way the film focuses more on the gruesome killings than the characters and its unsettling erotic violence must have shocked audiences in the 60s, but it set the precedent for the next 20 years of horror films (at least). I was really drawn to Bava’s mixture of art house theatrics and lowbrow subject matter and admire his technical chops and over the top stylistic tendencies. Blood and Black Lace was a great introduction to an influential director, and I can’t wait to delve deeper into Bava’s filmography.

Upcoming Movie of the Months
May: Brandon presents Crimes of Passion (1984)
June: James presents Blow Out (1981)

House of Whipcord (1974)

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threehalfstar

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“This film is dedicated to those who are disturbed by today’s lax moral codes and who eagerly await the return of corporal and capital punishment….”

What happens when moral standards are taken to the extreme? Director Pete Walker explores this idea in one of the most interesting horror exploitation films I’ve ever seen. I expected House of Whipcord to be a hot mess, but it was actually a pretty solid horror film with exceptional acting from just about every cast member. Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t the crème de la crème of horror cinema; it’s still super campy and goofy.

In an abandoned prison located in the English countryside, there’s a couple of sadistic older women who have turned the building into a phony correctional facility for corrupt young girls. The leader of the facility is an elderly blind man who is mentally in a different century, believing he’s some sort of judge that determines the life or death of imprisoned women. His wife, the reincarnation of the devil himself, and her son, Mark E. DeSade (hmm, sounds a bit similar to Marquis de Sade . . . ), are major sadists who purposely get the imprisoned girls in trouble so they can get off on their punishments, particularly flogging. Mark lures sinful women from the city by offering to bring them to his beautiful home in the countryside (aka the abandoned prison). The film focuses on a French model, Anne-Marie DeVarnet (Penny Irving), who is Mark’s latest prey. She seriously has the worst French accent ever, but she’s a pretty good actress nonetheless. There are lots of twists and turns that occur once Anne-Marie enters the prison, and it all leads to a very surprising ending.

I truly appreciated the 70s low budget charm in House of Whipcord. Shoddy camera work, high-pitched screams, eerie background music, and unnecessary nudity are plentiful, but there’s not a lot of gore, which is surprising for a film about torture and punishment. According to a few articles and reviews I’ve read about the film, it was supposed to make a political statement about censorship and right-wing policies on capital punishment. I guess I can sort of see where it touches on the absurdity of capital punishment, but that’s not the main focus of the film. This is a horror movie and I see it as nothing more than a horror movie. Ultimately, House of Whipcord is a horror film that delivers and does not disappoint.

House of Whipcord is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Britnee Lombas

Phase IV (1974)

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fourstar

When I’m prompted to imagine a film about murderous insects, I think back to the atomic creature features of the 1950s. I picture close-ups of actual insects scaling miniature models of suburban homes crudely combined with shots of victims screaming for their lives in the grasp of the invader’s oversized paper mache pincers. In my imagination, the insects become monsters through massive size alone, a tradition carried down all the way from 1957’s The Deadly Mantis to 2002’s Eight Legged Freaks. A refreshing deviation from this norm, 1974’s Phase IV surprisingly makes a threat of its murderous ants without blowing them out of proportion, but instead giving them a much more dangerous attribute: intelligence.

The killer ants in Phase IV are shrewd, organized, and scarily adaptable. They attack their predators preemptively, methodically killing spiders, praying mantises, and then humans as if they’re assassins taking orders. They turn automobiles into bombs, dismantle computers, and weaponize reflected sunlight in a vengeful reflection of a bored child with a magnifying glass. When sprayed with poisons, they purposefully evolve to include the toxins in their next mutation. The nature footage the film manages to cull is very impressive. It’s rare that this brand of sci-fi schlock would be perplexing on a technical level, but Phase IV kept me guessing. Sure, there were the inevitable close-up shots of ants eating cut with images of a collapsing set, but a lot of the film had me scratching my head as to just exactly how they got their footage. Did they dye the mutant ants? Was some of the action achieved though stop-motion animation? Did they write the movie around the kind of footage they could influence? I had a lot of questions about the production of Phase IV that I normally wouldn’t have in other films of its caliber.

Of course, Phase IV has its campy charms as well. The scientists that study/go to war with the ants bring a lot of good ole sci-fi nonsense like geodesic domes, futuristic hazmat suits, decontamination steam, and very sciency bleep bloop machines along with them. The opening narration is accompanied by outer space animation that recalls the ridiculousness of The Adventures of Hercules. The film also occasionally adopts the ants’ POV through a honeycomb-patterned kaleidoscope lens probably best described as “ant cam”. The cheap Western landscape setting (which resembles the remote communities where the atom bomb was developed) gives the film an automatic otherworldly look, which combines effectively with the ants’ naturally alien features in the nature footage close-ups. The queen ant is also provided some red/blue Creepshow lighting, which does wonders for her appeal as a villain and the film’s appeal as a silly diversion. It’s easy to see why Phase IV was given the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, but I feel like that brand of mockery is selling its other merits a bit short.

Visually bizarre, technically impressive, tonally unnerving, and backed by a wickedly cool soundtrack of droning synths (recently made available 40 years late by Waxwork Records), Phase IV is a thoroughly strange film. Its loose, psychedelic ending was apparently cut short by butchers at Paramount Pictures (with some of the more bizarre surviving footage thankfully preserved in the trailer and elsewhere on YouTube), but the remaining effect is an open-ended conclusion that’s rare for this genre & era. The film isn’t exactly on an Under the Skin level of obfuscation & psychedelia, but it’s not far off. As far as sci-fi schlock about murderous insects goes, Phase IV is an impressive oddity with a killer soundtrack and some highly effective nature footage backing up its inherently campy appeal. It’s tempting to brush it off as a silly trifle based on premise alone, but there’s something much more peculiar going on here. It’s a shame that first-time director Saul Bass, known mostly as a graphic designer in his work on movie posters & title sequences, would never follow it up with a second feature. He had a great knack for striking visuals & eerie moods that could’ve translated into a long, interesting career if given the chance to flourish.

-Brandon Ledet

Counterpoint: In Defense of Honeymoon (2014)

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Reading over James’ review of last year’s Honeymoon, I was a little surprised by how dismissive it was. Sure, Honeymoon was far from the most original horror film ever made, but as a low-budget creep-out I found it to be fairly effective. James started his review by comparing the film to how he would imagine an arranged marriage: “Forced into it, you look for the positives and hold out hope that it might end up working out, only to end up completely disappointed.” There are a few reasons I find that statement unfair. For one thing the film was very much low-profile, so it’s hard to imagine anyone being “forced into it.” I’m more interested, however, in exactly why the film left him disappointed: the fact that he had seen the same story told before.

Fans of horror should be more than familiar with a little repetition. Themes, images, music cues, and plot structures are copied so liberally in horror that it has one of the longest lists of subgenres out there (including the likes of “slashers”, “creature features”, “giallo” and so on), each complete with its own genre-trappings & clichés common to nearly every film under its umbrella. James’ central disappointment with Honeymoon seemed to be that the film did not surprise him on a plot level. When I had previously written about the film on this site, I compared its my-wife-is-not-my-wife story to both Slither and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It didn’t especially bother me that I had seen similar (and admittedly more surprising) versions of Honeymoon before, because all three films were so stylistically diverse. One thing I particularly liked about Honeymoon was how understated the central bodily invasion was in comparison to the fever pitch ridiculousness of Slither and the widespread panic of Body Snatchers. Honeymoon is a story we’ve seen told before, sure, but rarely this intimately or realistically, with the victim forgetting to batter French toast or awkwardly saying “take a sleep” instead of “take a nap” as the early signs that something is horribly wrong.

James’ secondary complaint was that “the first third of Honeymoon is almost entirely the two [newlywed protagonists] fawning, staring longingly into each other’s eyes, and discussing their future. It is as tedious as it sounds.” I believe the sickening tedium of young love was an intentional effect here, especially considering that the film was set so early in a marriage instead of at a later stage. Throughout the early flirtations in the film it’s revealed that the young husband doesn’t really know his new bride well at all. He’s surprised by her boating abilities, stories from her past involving the place they’re vacationing, and her opposition to having children. Early in the film he even asks her “Who are you?” in a playful way. Later, after the life-altering/body-snatching event in the woods, he again asks “Who are you?” with a much more terrifying intent. There’s also a connection to the way he playfully threatens to tie her up in bed while they’re flirting and the way he forcefully ties her up in the scene James describes as “a flurry of gore that had the other people I was watching it with cover their eyes”. I think a lot of the point of Honeymoon was that although the couple was in the sickeningly sweet PDA part of their relationship at the beginning of the film, the marriage was already troubled. Jealousy, distrust, and a general lack of knowledge of each other were already major problems for the couple before that fateful meeting in the woods. When James notes that late in the film “Paul, terrified, starts to believe Bea is no longer the person he married,” he’s right, but I’m not sure Paul ever had a firm grasp of who it was he married in the first place, which is a scary thought with or without the gorey, supernatural context.

Honeymoon’s resolution may be “predictable”, but I disagree that the film that ramps up to it is “underwhelming”. It’s more that it’s a low-key, intimate take on an old story, one with new things to say about the ways young love can be scary. One of the best things about horror as a genre is the way old tropes can be reconfigured into new ideas and I think Honeymoon does just that in an admirable way, even if it’s not a home run. To be fair, I’m making a somewhat superficial distinction here between the movie being “not great” or “pretty good, actually”, but I feel it’s an important distinction all the same.

-Brandon Ledet

Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965)

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fourstar

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Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster is of the rare breed of old school shlock that lives up to the promise in its ridiculous title & premise. That’s no small feat. As I noted in my review of the similarly surprising in quality camp fest The Brainiac, “Like with all art forms, it’s difficult to find a great ‘bad movie’. For every transcendently awful Plan 9 or Troll 2 you have to sift through a hundred mind-numbingly dull Hobgoblins”, but on the other hand “When a B movie is firing on all cylinders, enthusiastically exploring every weird idea it has to their full potential, there’s really nothing like it.” Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, (which is also known by the titles Frankenstein Meets the Space Men, Mars Attacks Puerto Rico, Mars Invades Puerto Rico, and Operation San Juan) is firing on all its batshit crazy cylinders, squeezing a surprising amount of camp value out of its limited premise & budget.

Let’s get the film’s most peculiar detail out of the way: neither Dr. Frankenstein nor his monster appear in the flesh. The “Frankenstein” in the title is instead a government-created bionic astronaut that is horrifically scarred in a botched space launch. As his circuitry goes awry, he turns from ideal soldier to confused monster and haunts the coast of California, murdering its inhabitants indiscreetly. Although the interpretation of “a Frankenstein” is loose here, the practical effects in the gore surrounding the monster are pretty chilling. In an early scene his scalp is peeled back so scientists can tweak his malfunctioning circuitry. Later, the make-up on his disfiguring facial scars are a lot more horrifying than you’d expect based on the precedent of, say, Lobo in Bride of the Atom or the astronaut gorilla in Robot Monster. The other monsters in the film are only slightly less terrifying, including the titular “Space Monster” (who looks like a member of GWAR) and the space alien Dr. Nadir (who looks an awful lot like Bat Boy all growed up). Dr. Nadir may not be as physically threatening as his fellow monsters, but he steals the show with his effete love of his own cruelty, like a dime store Vincent Price.

The film is surprisingly technically proficient considering its circumstances. It boasts a similar premise and overreliance on stock footage as the camp classic Plan 9 from Outer Space, but thoroughly succeeds on both fronts, as opposed to Plan 9’s thorough failures. When the evil space princess that commands Dr. Nadir announces that they are to proceed with “Phase 2 of our Plan: capture of the Earth women” (a.k.a. “bikini babes”) it’s more amusing than embarrassing. You can feel the crew having a fun time making this thing, which is reflected in its music cues, among other things. Almost all of its outer space scenes are accompanied by a spooky theremin score, but its Earth scenes (whether a dance party, a murder, or an alien abduction) are almost all accompanied by a surf rock soundtrack, which gives the film a beach party vibe. The title of the film itself sounds like a ready-made name for a surf rock song and I’m surprised no one’s jumped on that opportunity in the 50 years since the film’s release.

I could go on, but describing what makes the movie work on a technical level is somewhat futile. I doubt I can mount a sales pitch that match the just-the-facts plot summary from the film’s Wikipedia page, so here it is in full: “All of the women on the planet Mars have died in an atomic war, except for Martian Princess Marcuzan. Marcuzan and her right-hand man, Dr. Nadir, decide they will travel to Earth and steal all of the women on the planet in order to continue the Martian race. The Martians shoot down a space capsule manned by the android Colonel Frank Saunders, causing it to crash in Puerto Rico. Frank’s electronic brain and the left half of his face are damaged after encountering a trigger-happy Martian and his ray gun. Frank, now ‘Frankenstein’, described by his creator as an ‘astro-robot without a control system’ proceeds to terrorize the island. A subplot involves the Martians abducting bikini clad women.” If that description alone doesn’t sell you on watching an ancient, goofy sci-fi horror I’m not sure what will. Also we are very different people.

-Brandon Ledet

WolfCop (2014)

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twohalfstar

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I really wanted to love WolfCop. A low-budget, crowd-funded Canadian indie horror comedy about a werewolf cop is just begging for my adoration, especially considering the glowing reviews I’ve given titles like Zombeavers and Monster Brawl. As James pointed out earlier today in his review of Housebound, “Horror comedies are always a high wire act.” It’s difficult to strike the right balance between terror & humor and WolfCop is all the more frustrating because it’s so close to getting the formula right I can smell it even without superhuman/canine scent. The film’s premise is killer; its bodily gore is impressive; there’s a plot-summarizing rap song in the closing credits (which is always a plus no matter what anyone tells you); there’s just something essential missing in the final product.

If I had to pinpoint exactly what’s lacking in WolfCop, my best guess is that there just isn’t enough werewolf policing. The origin story segment of the film lasts entirely too long as we follow Sergeant Lou Garou through a series of wicked hangovers that eventually lead him to awaking a changed man. Lou struggles to suppress his newly found werewolf form in long stretches, which is fine for a man who’s trying to survive, but not too exciting for the audience that follows him. Becoming a werewolf does little to curb Lou’s drinking, but it does make him a better cop, but initially only in the sense that he starts doing paperwork & researching the history of the occult in the town he polices. By the time Lou is busting up meth labs & preventing armed robberies in werewolf form AND a police uniform, which is essentially the main draw of the film, the runtime is more than halfway over. There are some great exchanges in those segments, like when a gang member asks “What the fuck are you?” and the WolfCop responds “The fuzz,” but they’re honestly too few too late and soon fade in favor of a story about an evil cult that doesn’t really amount to much more than a distraction.

There are certainly more than a few glimpses of brilliance in WolfCop. The practical effects in the gore are the most winning element in play, featuring gross-out bodily horror like close-ups of hair growing like porcupine quills, several disembodied faces, pentagrams carved into bellies, a switchblade piercing an eyeball and the most blood I’ve ever seen pass through a urethra in a particularly brutal scene where Lou transforms into a werewolf dick-first. There’s also a hilarious sex scene seemingly inspired by The Room that marks the first time I’ve ever seen a werewolf go down on a bartender or enjoy a post-coital cigarette. A couple of these moments are spoiled by some winking-at-the-camera gimmicks (like the much-hated-by-me CGI blood spatter on the camera lens effect), but for the most part the main problem is that they’re isolated highlights and the film that surrounds them is kind of a bore. I get the feeling that WolfCop works better as a highlight reel than a feature, seemingly peaking with its trailer or its poster. That’s not even that big of a deal, though. The trailer & the poster are honestly true works of art at a level a lot of horror comedies fail to reach even in advertising. There’s so much promise & potential in WolfCop as a concept, that even though I wasn’t completely sold on the first installment, the post-credits promise of a WolfCop II arriving in 2015 still excited me. My hope is that now that the origin story has been taken care of, we can get straight to the business of werewolf policing. Give the people what they want. Our demands are simple: we merely want more wolf-cop in our WolfCop.

-Brandon Ledet

Housebound (2014)

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fourstar

Horror comedies are always a high wire act. Some titles like Dead Alive and Tucker & Dale vs. Evil find the right balance between laughs and chills, transcending their genre limitations, while others, (Kevin Smith’s latest, Tusk, for example), aim to be both scary and funny, but end up being neither. The 2014 New Zealand horror comedy Housebound, falls firmly in the former category. It’s a mishmash of genres that gracefully moves between horror, comedy, ghost story, and murder mystery.

The setup is perfect in its simplicity. Kylie, a troubled hooligan, is sentenced to eight months of house arrest following an attempt to break into an ATM. Forced to move back into her well-meaning, but clueless parent’s home, she lounges around, drinks during the day, and is a general pain in the ass. Things almost immediately start to go bump in the night. While she is initially skeptical of her mother’s ghost stories, an encounter with a maniacal, talking teddy bear convinces Kylie that the house is indeed haunted. She partners with Amos, the security guard in charge of monitoring her ankle bracelet, to investigate and discovers that there are plenty of other, more horrifying secrets waiting behind the walls of her family home.

Housebound is the writing-directing feature debut of Gerard Johnstone. His pitch-perfect script is wickedly funny without trying too hard and he shoots the film with a confident, playful style reminiscent of Sam Raimi. The film is also elevated by its strong performances. Morgana O’Reilly brings toughness, smarts, and loads of sarcasm to her portrayal of Kylie, making her female protagonist stronger than most found in the genre. Her partner Amos (Glen-Paul Waru) is a great comic foil and her gossiping, chatty mother (Rima Te Wiata) delivers plenty of laughs.

Of course it wouldn’t be a horror movie without scares and Housebound keeps the tension heightened throughout with a mix of false and very real terrors. Through his expert use of shadows and camera angles, cinematographer Simon Riera makes seemingly harmless objects like teddy bears and Jesus statues menacing. There’s also the obligatory gross-out moments, including a head-exploding bloody finale but Housebound also has an emotional core that addresses the rebellious nature of youth and learning to accept one’s parents that still resonates despite the craziness that surrounds it. It does go on for a little too long but that is only a minor fault; the film is so much fun you’ll barely notice. Offering an inventive mix of screwball comedy and white knuckle terror, Housebound is a perfectly calibrated horror comedy and one of the best horror movies of 2014.

Housebound is currently streaming on Netflix.

-James Cohn

The Canal (2014)

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threehalfstar

Horror is not a genre where individual films need to be narratively or stylistically idiosyncratic to work. Scary movies borrow so freely from each other that each of their subsets (“slashers”, “creature features”, “bodily horrors”, etc.) has its own lists of genre-trappings & clichés common to nearly every film under its umbrella. 2014’s stylish Irish ghost story The Canal is smart to acknowledge its heritage openly. The common images & themes it shares with films as varied as 2000s horror like The Ring or Blair Witch, early 20th century black & white scares like The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari, and 70s giallo classics like pretty much any title in Dario Argento’s catalog are so unashamedly open it plays like a knowing homage rather than an unfortunate side-effect of making a genre film. The Canal is so self-aware of the impressive range of horror it manages to cover in its 90min that its protagonist is a film archivist by occupation.

The story begins in a cinema, with the aforementioned film archivist David (played by Rupert Evans) addressing an unruly audience of children. He tells them that since the films about ghosts they are about to watch were filmed long ago and the people featured in them are most likely dead, it’s as if the images themselves are real-life ghosts. It’s a chilling thought that silences the room and it’s one I’ve pondered often, at least since I first read Hervé Guibert’s brilliant collection of photography essays Ghost Image or heard Daniel Johnston’s “It’s Spooky” in high school. The ghosts of The Canal are the believable kind, the kind that actually haunt us: images from the past, spaces that have been tainted by horrific acts, jealousy, regret, etc. The film shares a lot with last year’s The Babadook in that way: there’s a physical, violent threat that stalks its confined world, but it’s a threat that is based in more intangible elements like unhinged emotions and toxic personal relationships. It’s a testament to the film’s success that it can scare on a realistic level while still managing to run wild with obsessing over cinema as a medium, particularly the horror genre.

In addition to tipping its hat to a wide range of horror classics and setting several scenes in a movie theater, The Canal also prominently features images of cameras & projectors doing what they do: recording & displaying film. Giallo films, the most significant influence referenced in The Canal, generally have a particular theme or setting that guide their images, almost like a gimmick. For instance Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace is set in a fashion house and is littered with dressing mannequins; Dario Argento’s Opera is, well you get the picture. The Canal’s theme is film itself. Close-up shots of cameras & projectors are paired with loud clicks & whirs of the machines running and quick, disturbing flashes of violence & gore, seemingly from a wide range of different eras in scary filmmaking. The deep red of theater seats in the opening cinema scene plays into the giallo influence as well, as the genre is no stranger to saturated colors. Nor is it a stranger to the overwhelming sounds, lights, and masked killer that follow. The Canal’s intense focus on light & sound design boils cinema down to its most basic elements. The mystery of its mostly off-screen killer pays tribute to the Italian genre films that came before it, putting those elements to use in a genre context.

As film archivist David becomes more frayed in his search for the identity of the killer, the film gradually grows more erratic along with him. As a companion to last year’s similarly giallo-influenced The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears, The Canal is a much calmer telling of a very similar story. It chooses not to reach Strange Color’s kaleidoscopic fever pitch until the climax, which is in some ways more true to the genre they’re both referencing. Strange Color pushes the cinematic elements of giallo to new, psychedelic extremes. The Canal uses them to bridge the gap between a seemingly endless list of horror narratives that came before it, to the point where its ghost-in-the-walls story has just as much to do with Strange Color as it does with The Grudge or Nosferatu or the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Normally, it would feel like a kind of insult to review a film only through means of comparisons like this, but the nature of The Canal calls for it. It’s the story of film & horror as a genre just as much as it is the story of a man trying to solve the supernatural mystery of his wife’s murder. The impressive part is how it balances both narratives so well, one never overpowering the other. It works just as well as a reflection on film as a medium as it does a telling of an original, terrifying, albeit familiar ghost story.

-Brandon Ledet

Monster Brawl (2011)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

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We here at Swampflix love wrestling movies. We love horror & gore. We also love low-budget/high-concept camp. It should come to no surprise then that the low budget camp fest Monster Brawl, within which famous monsters fight to the death in a graveyard wrestling tournament, is a huge hit with us. It’s the perfect example of a high-concept thoroughly explored and a modest-at-best budget pushed to its limits. The movie so firmly in our wheelhouse that I’d suspect it was secretly made with us in mind if it weren’t released four years before our modest blog was born.

If you’re asking yourself why famous monsters would meet to wrestle in a literal death match in an American graveyard the answer is simple: to determine the most powerful ghoul of all time, of course. Monster Brawl is filmed like a televised wrestling promotion: the company’s logo appears in the bottom of the screen, each competitor boasts about their monstrous abilities in individual promos, and an announcing team calls the matches live as they happen. For a small-time promotion that started in someone’s mom’s basement (seriously) Monster Brawl secured a surprisingly deep, talented roster. The Undead Conference features The Mummy, Zombie Man, Lady Vampire, and Frankenstein (“Technically it’s Frankenstein’s monster if you want to be a dick about it”). Wrestling for The Creatures Conference we have Werewolf, Cyclops, Witch Bitch, and Swamp Gut (a local boy as it were; Swamp Gut is an obese, Louisiana-tinged knockoff of The Creature from the Black Lagoon). The monster make-up and the in-the-ring gore looks great, seemingly eating up most of the film’s budget considering the range & scope of the limited locations & actors. A lot of time & energy went into the monsters, which was the right decision, and it pays off in gags like hieroglyphics playing under The Mummy’s incomprehensible promo and the Cyclops’ face-searing laser beams (or “mythical laser blasts” if you will).

Narrating the action, Monster’s Brawl’s ringside announcers feature Kids in the Hall vet Dave Foley as a barely-functioning alcoholic and character actor Art Hindle as former Monster Brawl champion Sasquatch Sid Tucker. Foley & Hindle seem to have a lot of fun with the absurdity of their lines, which include gems like “We underestimated this monster. He must have been trained in vampire slaying techniques” and “For the first time in professional sports, folks, we’re witnessing the dead rising from their graves to attack Frankenstein.” Monster’s Brawl gets a lot right about the more ridiculous aspects of pro wrestling: the former-wrestlers-turned-announcers, the inconsequential refs, the outside-the-ring action, etc. Because the film’s “death matches” are quite literal the action can include violence that the more family-friendly WWE cannot: chair shots to the head, inter-gender matches, murder. The spirit of wrestling is captured well and even includes small roles for former NWO member Kevin Nash and Hulk Hogan’s former blowhard manager “The Mouth of the South” Jimmy Hart. In addition to Hart’s ecstatic shouting & the announcing team’s endless drunken blathering the film features a third level of narration: the disembodied voice of the legendary horror staple Lance Henrikson, who is billed here simply as “God”. Henrikson only occasionally interjects on the action, punctuating particularly gruesome wrestling moves with words like “Majestic.”, “Appalling.”, “Tremendous.”, and “Discombobulating.” in what has to be a parody of the narration in Mortal Kombat gameplay.

Just as Monster Brawl gets wrestling right, it also nails the tone of horror flicks. Instead of cheesy entrance music that usually accompanies performers, the famous monsters get the eerie horror soundtracks they deserve. The action of the film also devolves into complete chaos in its final act, which is pretty standard for a creature feature. We were fairly cruel to Monster Brawl director Jesse Thomas Cook’s most recent film, the “hideous poo beast” monster movie Septic Man, but Monster Brawl gets so much right about both its pro-wrestling-meets-classic-horror premise, that it’s impossible not to love it (given that wrestling or gore-soaked horror are your thing). Scripted & shot like a broadcast of a wrestling promotion every disturbed ten year old wishes existed, Monster Brawl is camp cinema at its finest.

-Brandon Ledet

Honeymoon (2014)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

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Watching the low budget horror flick Honeymoon is how I would imagine an arranged marriage going: forced into it, you look for the positives and hold out hope that it might end up working out, only to end up completely disappointed.

Brits Harry Treadaway & Rose Leslie (of Game of Thrones fame) play American newlyweds Paul & Bea, an ultra-happy, obnoxiously affectionate couple who decide to honeymoon in the most romantic destination imaginable: a remote cabin in the woods. Secluded, they fill their time with passionate sex, boat trips around the lake, and Yahtzee (“You’re my chance”). The first third of Honeymoon is almost entirely the two fawning, staring longingly into each other’s eyes, and discussing their future. It is as tedious as it sounds.

Thankfully, the feel-goods turn to feel-bads when, following a heated argument, Bea is found sleepwalking naked in the woods and begins behaving strangely. Paul, terrified, starts to believe Bea is no longer the person he married. Mysterious “mosquito bites” appear on her legs, he finds her coaching herself in the mirror on how to turn him down for sex, and, gasp, she forgets to batter the French toast.

Honeymoon‘s second act ratchets up the intensity and has a lot of interesting ideas, but you’ll still see the answers to the questions it raises coming from a mile away. The movie’s nightmarish final act ends features a flurry of gore that had the other people I was watching with cover their eyes, but still doesn’t fulfill the promise of the rest of the film. First time director Leigh Janiak does a great job of establishing a general uneasiness on a limited budget and Leslie & Treadaway give dedicated performances, but Honeymoon ends up falling under the weight of a underwhelming, predictable ending.

-James Cohn