Arcana (1972)

Arcana

Italy 1972 colour

Director Giulio Questi Writers Giulio Questi, Franco Arcalli

Cast Lucia Bosé (Mamma), Maurizio Degli Esposti (Son), Tina Aumont (Brenda), Renato Paracchi

Giulio Questi

“The bones, the bladder..” whispers a midget into a young man’s ear, while a woman licks a doorway. Yes, I’m proud to say, it’s going to be one of those nights as we delve into the bizarre world of renegade Italian director Guilio Questi and his strangest film of all, the 1972 horror movie Arcana.

Questi is a fringe figure in Italian cinema, creating films which straddle the populist genre and elitist art divide and finding himself an outsider in both worlds. In a career since the Fifties he’s completed no more than five theatrical features, working in television and documentaries. A self-avowed anarchist, his radicalized politics is ever-present in his grimmest film, the apocalyptic spaghetti western Django Kill from 1967, and in his capitalist giallo thriller set on a chicken farm from 1968, the appropriately named Plucked!, or Death Laid An Egg. His is an uncompromising stance, and is thus: never let the audience, or a logical story for that matter, get in the way of the pursuit of one’s art.

Curiously, Arcana – on the surface his least political film - has dropped out of circulation since its 1972 premiere, and one can only wonder what a cine-literate Italian crowd weaned on Fellini’s eccentricities would have gleaned from it. The film starts off benignly enough in a Rome apartment occupied by a fortune teller. On the surface she’s a charlatan, milking good lire from her customers from carefully-staged group psychodramas – a kind of primal scream therapy, only with pissing and shitting – presided over by her freakishly insightful son Mario. He truly has inherited his mother’s divine gifts, but manifests them in more disturbing fashions. His myriad of unhealthy obsessions include dead animals or animal parts, visiting the subway tunnel his railway worker father died in, stealing photos and objects from his mother’s customers and creating elaborate charms with them, and crawling into bed with his mother or slicing her breast with a kitchen knife. A visit from a young woman engaged to an older man and worried about her future seals her fate, and in her Mario finds himself the perfect doll to stick his pin in. Figuratively speaking, of course.

The key is in the film’s title – arcane, or esoteric, or more specifically the major and minor arcana making up the deck of Tarot cards, used for divining and revealing hidden knowledge. The film, Questi states in the opening, is “not a story, but a game of cards”. Both the start and the epilogue, he continues, are not to be believed; as the film is spilt into two parts, like the Tarot itself, one might suspect that the entire narrative is a lie. “You are the player,” says Questi, suggesting everything contained herein has a hidden meaning to be decoded. “Play smartly and you’ll win.”

Arcana is as much a horror film as David Lynch’s Eraserhead. While Lynch’s brand of nightmarish surrealism has found its way into post-modern pop culture, the eternal fringe-dweller Questi’s is of a much darker, more unsettling variety. Just when your feet are back on surer footing, the flowers start to die, the cards flip themselves over, children worship eggs or stick skewers in a bread homunculus, a donkey is hoisted up a building, and you are left the Hanging Man of the Major Arcana deck, caught halfway between revelation and damnation.

Arcana’s a rough ride, at times a Freudian avalanche-of-conscious imagery, and it’s in the second half the film veers off its rails and plows into much darker territory, past Fellini and into the domain of Bunuel, a universe of sex, death, politics, decay, deformity, and the “other world” which hangs over the film like a funereal veil. If you’re not a fan of demented art cinema of the Seventies, we’ll see you next week. For those with more metaphysical tastes, we invite you into the hidden world of Arcana.

Gunmaster G9 In Surakksha (1979)

Gunmaster G9 In Surakksha

India 1979 colour

Director Raveekant Nagaich Writers Rajvansh, Ramesh Pant

Cast Mithun Chakraborty (Gopi, Gunmaster G9) With Ranjeeta, Jeevan, Aruna Irani

Those of you who know me are aware of my obsession with Indian pulp movies of the Sixties and Seventies. One of my all-time favourite Bollywood films is Disco Dancer (1982), a low-rent tribute to Saturday Night Fever made five years late, by which time disco had truly died the death of a thousand cuts. But no, there was Mithun Chakraborty, in wide lapels and flares, strutting his dancefloor grooves through a Bolly mangling of “Video Killed The Radio Star”: tack heaped upon glorious tack, deliriously absurd, and one movie you must see in case you dismiss an entire subcontinent’s B grade treasures. To this day, Bengal-born Mithun is a golden idol of the cinema, now in his sixties with over 250 films under his belt, and Disco Dancer is celebrated in the same way Dirty Dancing is in Western culture minus the ironic sneer. In fact a friend of mine was trapped on a bus worming its way through the Himalayas, and the only cassette on the day long journey was the soundtrack to Disco Dancer. Doug now has “I am a disco dancer (pam-pam-paddup)” etched indelibly into the memory bank, and ever the cinematic sadist, I like to pop it on the CD player whenever he’s in the room. Yes, I too have the soundtrack; it does things to me that Patrick Swayze singing “She’s Like The Wind” can never achieve.

…which is a roundabout way of saying how much I love the rat-arse end of Bollywood cinema. Imagine my joy, therefore, to discover the Disco Dancer himself was the Bollywood James Bond in a previous incarnation. Yes, that’s Mithun Chakraborty as Gunmaster G-9 In Surakksha, or “Protection”, his first smash hit and the first of two G9 adventures. As much as I love Disco Dancer, I have a horrible feeling it’s been replaced – Gunmaster G9 is pure, unadulterated, ghee-coated 100% Bolly Gold. For starters, we have the genuine article, a disco era artefact with its ghastly fashions and insidious musical atrocities intact. No sooner are the credits over, Mithun is straight into said disco number about how irresistible he is to women. As Gopi, codename G9, his satyric wanderlust is a problem to his spy career, as he just can’t seem to keep his little Gopi in his flares. “It’ll be the reason for his death,” says the Mumbai version of M, head of the CBI, as he orders G9 to investigate a dead airline pilot and missing map to a diamond mine. And the pilot is not the only Indian male in this movie to be led astray by the gorgeous but treacherous Neelam, Bollywood’s own Pussy Galore in her red boots and vinyl hotpants.

Neelam and the silver-haired gangster Hiralal are also behind the disappearance of fellow agent Jackson (no last name), whom his family believed to be dead, as his body was delivered to their front door in a crate! Believed, that is, until Gopi pries open his coffin and finds a skeleton with some elaborate plastic surgeon performed on it. His frantic search leads him and his comic disciple Kabadi to the beautifully aloof Priya – no mere conquest this time, as Gopi falls deeply and desperately in love - and to the real brains behind the criminally awful Shiv Shakti Organization. And a suitably over-the-top Bond villain he is: perched in his underwater lair, surrounded by kung fu experts and zombie butlers, Dr Shiva is a self-proclaimed genius with one eye and metal hand who declares himself more powerful than all gods, Shiva included, and intends to destroy the world – but not before he demands our hero dance for his life in a contest with the surprisingly musical Hiralal!

The first thing you notice about this Bond-on-a-hundredth-the-budget clone is its incredible array of miniatures which put Thunderbirds to shame, setting fire to toy cars and planes and throwing them off a dirt hill. What are very real are the snakes: one found in Gopi’s dinner tray, and hundreds of them in tanks, all slithering to life during a smash-em-up kung fu battle at a water snake farm. The great leveller in that particular scene, for me, is the moment when Gopi’s opponent falls into a giant vat – only to be menaced by the same rubber shark I owned as ten year old. Dr Shiva’s lair itself is a masterpiece of modernist pap, a triumph of bullshit over budget, and quite simply the most implausible Bondian villain’s lair committed to celluloid, from its glass wall showing dangerously magnified goldfish to Shiva’s wall of clunky 70s TV sets – all six of them, the wood veneer types with the chunky channel dial. This is one underwater layer whose sinking wouldn’t raise a fart bubble in a bath tub, and believe me, this is a supreme compliment.

Gunmaster G9 has everything you want in a James Bond movie. Comedy! Romance! Musical numbers! Try spotting every intentional reference to a Bond film: the underwater lair from Spy Who Loved Me/Dr No, the poison string routine from You Only Live Twice, the funeral procession from Live And Let Die, and Goldfinger’s card game via binoculars… I’m sure I missed a few too, and please let me know what you discover. Best of all, Gunmaster G9 races along like a runaway Datsun and clocks in at just over two hours with nary a dull moment – a rarity for Mumbai’s regulation three hour masala marathons.

Gunmaster G9 will return to Schlock Treatment in the near future in Wardaat from 1981. Meanwhile, settle back, put your eye patch on and your BeeGees album on 45 as we watch our favourite Bond moments forced through the Bollywood mincing machine in Gunmaster G9 In Surakksha!

Titans Of The Ring (1973)

Titans Of The Ring

Argentina 1973 colour

aka Titanes En El Ring

Director/Writer Leo Fleider

Cast Martín Karadagián, Ovidio Fuentes, Gloria Raines, Dakar

Long before WWF turned the noble sport of wrestling into an elaborate parody, Central and South American were already elevating their masked wrestlers dangerously close to sainthood. Mexico in particular named their greatest ever luchadore El Santo or The Saint, and his funeral in the early 80s (mask still firmly in place, of course) resembled the passing of Pope John Paul II. In Argentina, wrestling would evolve into a different and far less reverential form of pop culture phenomenon, one in which historical figures wrestle space creatures, and long dead mummies. With Titanes En El Ring, or Titans Of The Ring, the circus had truly came to town!

Its founding father, part-Armenian wrestler Martin Karadagian had spent over twenty years on the professional circuit as a rudo or heel, unleashing his dirty bag of tricks onto his much bigger and faster opponents, and was remembered as much for his tall tales as for his wrestling prowess, which even he would admit wasn’t spectacular. But he was a showman, and the self-aggrandizing jibber-jabber was all part of the show. By the early 50s, wrestling in South America was bigger than ever thanks to TV’s all-present eye, but as a small-screen fad had worn out its welcome by 1962. It needed a facelift, and one of Karadagian’s publicized stunts led to Channel 9 in Buenos Aires offering him a TV contract. Wrestling was cheap to produce, and in theory was easy to capture the public’s imagination. Thus, Titanes En El Ring was born.

As the show grew, so did the stable of eccentric characters cooked up by Karadagian. By 1964, Titanes… no longer resembled wrestling, but rather epic cartoonish battles of good-vs-evil, and no more silly than La Momia who debuted in 1965, a deaf-mute monster wrestling in full bandages, and whose limited trademark moves included a washboard backhand to the opponent’s skull. The kids loved it, purists despised what had become of their beloved sport, and by the early Seventies Titanes En El Ring had became the most-watched TV show in Argentina, now on Channel 13 on Friday nights, and squeezing 2000 fans into its tiny studio. Critics loved it too, praising the revamped show for its “originality, vitality, and innovation, condensing surrealism – primitive yet genuine - into its wildest state.”

It is fitting, then, that Titanes En El Ring made its big-screen debut in 1973, and that its main protagonists are two children, Miguelito and Carolina. Naturally they’re the show’s biggest fans, and sit in the audience in rapture while Karadagian parades his cavalcade of wrestling oddities, each with their own theme tune: literary figures Don Quixote (in full armour!) and Sancho Panza, the topical Hippie Hair and Hippie Jimmie, and Cucumber The Clown, whose grease paint and baggy pants compound the circus atmosphere. An alien in a helmet and bright yellow outfit would periodically emerge from a space ship lowered into the ring in a flurry of smoke. Then of course there’s La Momia – friend to all children! – going slap-happy on Karadagian the Armenian, whose ringside persona by now slips effortlessly between good guy, villain and carnival barker.

Miguelito constantly brags about knowing the Titans in an effort to impress his young girlfriend. To save face, his father convinces Karadagian to let the kids hang out at their training session. “Why are there good and bad Titans?” they later ask their new friend over sodas. The wise Armenian describes his show as a microcosm of the world – the universal struggle between light and shadow – and not just grown men in silly costumes throwing shit around and beating each other into meat. By mid-movie we’re treated to a rock and roll number and very little plot to speak of; luckily Carolina’s father is kidnapped by goons, and the Titans rally to the rescue. And that’s it. As a movie it’s candyfloss, all sugar and asbestos and little substance, and screw you for wanting anything more. The crowd shots of adoring young kids’ faces – that’s your demographic right there, the young, and the young and cheerfully dumb at heart.

As for the Titans, their peak in popularity in the early 70s translated to a long and painful decline until the show was cancelled in 1988. Karadagian lost a leg to diabetes several years before but would still hobble around the outside of the ring pulling pranks on both tecnicos and rudos. One time he threw his cane away, and announced dramatically to the audience, “I am alive! I don’t need the cane because the ring and the fans keep me standing.” His words proved to be prophetic, and he passed away three years after the show’s end, a thin and frail little man living in a convent infirmary, and a far cry from the king Titan we witness tonight. Prepare yourself for a unique peek into Argentinian pop culture circa 1973, with Titanes En El Ring, or Titans Of The Ring.

26th December 2010: Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny (1972)

Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny

USA 1970/1972 colour

Directors Barry Mahon, R. Winer

Cast Jay Clark (Santa Claus), Shay Garner (Thumbelina), Pat Morrell (Mrs Mole), Bob O'Connell (Mr Digger)

Ladies and gentlemen, we have discovered the entrance to Hell, and it’s an amusement park in Florida. And it’s here we’re spending Boxing Day – and the end of the current season of Schlock Treatment – in the torturous sands of Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny (1972). You’d assume, in this season of giving, that we’ve saved the best of Schlock for last, right? Well, our film tonight is not so much a movie as a kind of wretched wrapping paper around a not-so-wretched short. In fact, Santa’s mulligan stew of school play, tacky home movie footage and amusement park advert, could be a new genre: the panto-mercial, of which its single entry Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny is clearly its outstanding example. To rub salt into our bleeding eyes, it displays a common trait amongst the kiddie matinee films, and that’s naked contempt for its audience, whom the filmmakers believe will watch any old horseshit, so long as there’s a candy cane parked in the top. [sound of crickets…]

But hey kids, it’s Santa Claus! Wait…oh no! He’s stranded in the sand dunes of Florida and his sleigh is stuck without his reindeer. The kids from the neighbourhood heed his distress call, and empty what seems like the entire menagerie of a petting zoo to help pull the sleigh. There’s a cow, and a frightened sheep, a guy in a gorilla suit – this is all filmed, by the way, in excruciating detail – and even a donkey, but Santa’s clearly no Baby Jesus. Meanwhile, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn just happen to be floating down the Mississippi River (cue “Old Man River” on kazoos), and offer their angry raccoon from the safety of some bushes. From what we can gather from his litany of clichés, Santa’s frustrated with his lot, but the world’s children need their toys, greedy little selfish bastards that they are . Never give up, Santa tells the wilting kids, have faith and BELIEVE. And, since Santa’s footage is almost an hour short of feature length, here’s a story to hammer the point home…

And so we arrive at our film-within-a-film, which comes with an interesting legacy. How did the director of A Good Time With A Bad Girl (1967) come to make kiddie horrors? Barry Mahon is one interesting cat. An American World War 2 fighter pilot shot down over Europe, his POW experience later inspired the Steve McQueen movie The Great Escape, but it’s his adventures in Filmland that most interest us here at Schlock HQ. By sheer twist of fate Mahon became Errol Flynn’s manager and directed his rancid swansong Assault Of The Cubal Rebel Girls (1959) which, along with the ill-fated Flynn vehicle William Tell, scuttled any chance at a serious career in Hollywood A-films. Instead, White Slavery (late 50s), a movie he shot in Tangiers while he and Flynn were laying low, sealed his fate, and he began a series of nudie cutie films, some with Playboy bunnies sourced by glamour photographer Bunny (“I shot Bettie Page”) Yeager. As the Sixties progressed, the benign nudie antics of Pagan Island (1960) and Girls On Tiger Reef (1965) gave way to notorious “roughies” like The Beast That Killed Women (1965) and The Sex Killer (1967), and then POOF! Like a third-rate magic act the pornographer disappeared, and Mahon the Kiddie Matinee King took his place: six shortish films in rapid succession around 1969 and 1970, and mostly shot at a doomed Florida amusement park called Pirate’s World, a place remembered more for its rowdy concerts by The Doors and Iron Butterfly than any of the buccaneer-themed rides.

Thumbelina (1970) was Mahon’s cardboard rendition of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, a burnt-out fluro nightmare lit sparingly with dayglo splashes by a filmmaker who clearly didn’t have a clue what the word “psychedelic” meant. Its two inch heroine suffers all manner of ignomies – sleeping in a walnut, kidnapped by frogs, pimped by a widowed mole and railroaded into marrying her octogenarian neighbour – and all with customary good cheer and boundless optimism. Indeed, every human-sized creature, or man-sized anthropomorphic puppet with flapping yapping mouths, wants a piece of Thumbelina, or to at least feast on her innocence. That is, until a thawed out bird gives her a glimpse of freedom AND true happiness, prompting yet another ghastly unmusical musical number. It’s like the rock opera Hair before it hit puberty and was still high-pitched and hairless. Sure, Thumbelina is a step up in production values from the Santa footage, but when you’ve hit rock bottom, you’ve nowhere else to go. What ever you do, don’t drift off to sleep and let its hideous tune about “twelve pennies” soak into your brain-sponge.

As Thumbelina draws to its depressing conclusion, it’s back to The Suck, and a sand-bound Santa still cursing his existential funk via a stream-of-consciousness gibberish issuing forth from his sweat-stained beard. I have absolutely no doubt there won’t be one single viewer left sitting by the end of the film, so I can safely give away the ending – Santa’s sleigh is saved by the Ice Cream Bunny, a pathetic seven foot threadbare creature even Jimmy Stewart in a percodin haze couldn’t have conjured. I can only assume it was the park’s mascot, as it drives the kids for a victory lap in a vintage fire engine past its numerous rides and attractions. It can perform only two functions, driving and winking like a dead, rotting, reanimated and fur-covered Marilyn Monroe. I swear, if anything screams Christmas more than the Ice Cream Bunny, I’ll happily choke on a homeless man’s sick, with the film’s “Jingle Bells” for kazoo playing as my funeral dirge. Happy Christmas everybody, and see you sometime in 2011 for the next season on Schlock Treatment as we leave you with the 1972 Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny.

The Ice Cream Bunny winks out in Morse Code "Happy Christmas, Schlockateers!"

19th December 2010: War Of The Zombies (1964)

War Of The Zombies

Italy 1964 colour

aka Rome Against Rome, Roma Contro Roma, Night Star: Goddess Of Elektra

Director Giuseppe Vari Writers Ferruccio de Martino, Massimo de Rita, Piero Pierotti, Marcello Sartarelli

Cast John Drew Barrymore (Aderbad), Susy Andersen (Tullia), Ettore Manni (Gaius), Ida Galli (Rhama), Mino Doro (Lutetius), Ivano Staccioli (Sirion), Philippe Hersent (Azer)

“Unconquerable warriors of the damned!” screams the US poster for War Of The Zombies. “SEE the undead cross swords with the living! SEE the goddess of the night whose gaze mummifies men!” Sounds to me like the premise for one of the most incredible horror films ever. Imagine then your reaction when the film unspools and it’s YET ANOTHER ITALIAN SWORD AND SANDAL MOVIE! As if American theatre screens and televisions weren’t inundated enough in the early to mid Sixties with peplum-themed product, the films’ distributors – in War Of The Zombies’ instance, American International Pictures – were forced, as the peplum cycle was grinding towards its demise, to primp up or flat-out lie about their content.

Luckily War Of The Zombies from 1964 is not just another Sons of Hercules muscle-fest, but an ambitious fantasy-horror ranking comfortably near Mario Bava’s Hercules In The Haunted World and Riccardo Freda’s The Witches Curse. In War Of The Zombies, however, there’s no Hercules, Samson or Ursus as the beefcake-flavoured focal point. Instead the film’s hero is Roman centurion Gaius, sent without his troops to the troubled Salmacia province to investigate Rome’s missing tribute. In the opening sequence Roman troops carrying treasure from Salmacia back to Rome are butchered by barbarians, stripped of their armour and their bodies stolen by deformed scavengers. It appears the entire province, including its weak Roman pretern Letitius and his double-crossing snake of a wife Tullia, is under the spell of a devilish cult dedicated to the Moon Goddess and “daughter of Isis”, whose Oath of Blood is performed under the blazing high beam of its enormous stone bust’s single Third Eye. Through Letitius’ slave girl Rhama, held in a trance by the cult’s high priest Aderbad, Gaius learns of its plan to revive the spirits of the dead Roman soldiers and lead them into an ultimate showdown against their own living comrades.

Sounds incredible, and to a certain extent it is. This IS a peplum, let’s not forget, and as such there are dry patches of wooden dialogue and stiff-as-corpses emoting to suffer. Once we wade through the regulation courtships and betrayals, however, we’re presented with the payoff: a magnificent low-rent but surprisingly effective battle between the living and the dead, smothered with superimposed colour swirls of saturated reds and blues (Mario Bava’s favourite palette for supernatural effects). Rather than rotting corpses, the Moon Goddess’ army is presented as ghostly figures, their otherworldliness underscored by slow motion cameras and an eerie echo-laden soundtrack. Just as impressive is the over-the-top performance of their leader, high priest Aderbad, played by John Drew Barrymore (son of John Barrymore, father of Drew Barrymore) in one of his numerous Italian film appearances between numerous cocktails in the early Sixties. Quasi-psychedelic, and several notches above your ordinary Italian sword and sandal, is the zombie-themed peplum chiller Rome Against Rome, or War Of The Zombies.

12th December 2010: Revenge Of The Zombies (1943) & Valley Of The Zombies (1946)

Revenge Of The Zombies

USA 1943 b&w

Director “Steve Sekely”/Istvan Szekely Writers Edmond Kelso, Van Norcross

Cast John Carradine (Dr Max Heinrich Von Altermann), Gale Storm (Jennifer Rand), Robert Lowery (Larry Adams), Bob Steele (Sheriff), Mantan Moreland (Jeff), Veda Ann Borg (Lila), Mauritz Hugo (Scott Warrington, Lila’s brother), Sybil Lewis (Rosella), Madame Sul-Te-Wan (Mammy Beulah)

I’m sure many of our viewers are familiar with the old Universal terrors of the Thirties and Forties, the domain of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr, John Carradine and many other classic Hollywood boogeymen. Those old guys didn’t just survive on big studio meals, however, and were just as busy in the lower strata of the film business, the much more threadbare B programmers of rattier studios such as Republic Pictures and Monogram. Dismissed by many as mere el-cheapo crowd pleasers, I find the B pictures enjoyably cheap and formulaic, relatively fat-free quickies with a charm all of their own.

Monogram Pictures’ Revenge Of The Zombies begins deeeep in the fog-shrouded Louisiana swamps, to the call of the zombies (“Ar-Wooooooooooooooooooooo!”). Dead bodies are rising from their coffins and crawling around the estate of the insane scientist Dr Max Von Altermann (a low-key but still menacing John Carradine). His wife’s brother has learnt of her sudden and inexplicable “heart attack”, and he and his police buddy arrive to investigate, only to discover Von Altermann’s experiments are in creating an army of unstoppable, unkillable undead ubermentsch for his Nazi overlords. You can even hear him train them in his basement – “Ein, schwei…” – and yet his ultimate enemy may be the steel will of his own dead wife…

Intended as a sequel to the 1941 King Of The Zombies, Revenge… is more of a revamp utilizing some of the cast, and its adherence to elements already poached from Bela Lugosi’s White Zombie from 1933. Returning is Mantan Moreland, comedian from all-black vaudeville known as the Chitlin’ Circuit; as in King Of The Zombies and his long-running stint as Charlie Chan’s chauffeur, Moreland essays his driver role as the bug-eyed, superstitious and terrified comic relief, and like his contemporary Step’n’Fetchit, a wholly un-PC example of pre-Civil Rights Hollywood. Conversely the film’s most interesting character is Von Altermann’s old African-American servant Mammy Beulah, played by Madame Sul-Te-Wah (also from King…), a D.W. Griffiths stalwart from such early epics as Intolerance (1916) and that grand ol’ ole to the KKK, Birth Of A Nation (1915). Unlike the “lordy lord” antics of the exasperating Moreland, there’s depth and a quiet dignity in Madame Sul-Te-Wah, not easy to maintain amidst the chorus of massas and sho ‘nuffs. The anti-Nazi propaganda may seem forced, but Revenge Of The Dead was after all released in the opening phases of America’s involvement in World War 2, and is infinitely more subtle than Hungarian-born director Istvan Szekely’s other film from the period, Hitler’s Women (also 1943).

Valley Of The Zombies

USA 1946 b&w

Director Philip Ford Writers Dorrel McGowan, Stuart McGown

Cast Robert Livingstone (Dr Terry Evans), Lorna Gray (Nurse Susan Drake), Ian Keith (Ormond Murks), Thomas Jackson (Detective Blair)

Both King and Revenge Of The Zombies must have made enough cashola for rival company Republic Pictures to release the exploitatively-titled Valley Of The Zombies in 1946. The film certainly wastes no time in plunging straight into the guts of the story: a tall figure in a top hat and cloak breaks into a doctor’s office at the hospital’s morgue and demands a supply of his rare blood type, only to reveal himself as Ormond Murks, the insane criminal mind the doctor had committed several years before for claiming to have found the secret of eternal life. Murks was later pronounced dead and interred in his family crypt, but has since existed somewhere between the living and the dead by stealing packaged supplies of his precious life fluid…until now, he decides, that fresher really IS better. Thus begins a string of murders throughout the city, all strangled, drained of blood and then meticulously embalmed. Chief suspects are the morgue’s resident couple Dr Terry Evans and Nurse Susan Drake, a wise-cracking pair of amateur sleuths equally at home prowling around mausoleums at midnight or napping on the morgue’s slab. Naturally they’re two steps ahead of the bumbling Irish-American cops, which means the ditzy Nurse Susan is a sitting target for Murks’ dastardly plans.

If ever there was a film screaming out for a name actor to carry it, it’s Valley Of The Zombies. The role of Murks would have usually been reserved for Boris Karloff; instead we’re given Ian Keith, a salted plum of a stage actor who was once in the running for Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. Here he’s more Tod Slaughter than Lugosi, an adequate by-the-numbers villain who sadly only ever hints at the evocative Valley in the title, its voodoo rituals and Devil’s potions the source of his secrets. Thus we’re treated to one zombie-like scientist, and one hypnotized broad who acts like the living dead. Thanks, Republic, you suckered us alright. Still, Valley Of The Zombies is brisk, ghoulish fun, in the tradition of many B detective serials of the era, and a throwback to a pre-George Romera era when the word “zombie” had an air of mystery about it.

Sunday 5th December 2010: Return Of The Evil Dead (1973)

Return Of The Evil Dead

Spain 1973 colour

aka El Ataque De Los Meurtos Sin Ojos/“Attack Of The Eyeless Dead”, Return Of The Blind Dead, Revenge Of The Evil Dead

Director/Writer Amando de Ossorio

Cast “Tony Kendall”/Luciano Stella (Jack Marlowe), Fernando Sancho (Mayor Duncan), “Esther”/Esperenza Roy (Vivian), “Frank Blake”/Franco Brana (Dacosta)

Just as George Romero changed the face of zombie cinema with his groundbreaking Night Of The Living Dead (1968), Spanish director Amando de Ossorio gave them a distinctly European neo-gothic makeover in a series of four films from 1971 to 1975. Known as the Blind Dead Quartet, the films feature the reanimated skeletal remains of the Knights Templar, keepers of the secrets of eternal life and now unstoppable killing machines on undead horses and clad in their Templar garb. Their skull features blazing empty eye sockets require them to find their victims entirely by sound...the trick is to not scream their lungs out at their ghastly appearance!

Tonight's film Return Of The Evil Dead is the second in the Quartet, following on the bony heels of Tombs Of The Blind Dead (1971), while completely reinventing its Templar back story, as the whimsical de Ossorio did with each entry. This time the blood-drinking, human sacrificing Templars are holed up in an Abbey in the Spanish town of Berzanzo, their eyes burnt out by angry villagers and set on fire – but not before a curse falls upon their descendants. Five hundred years later and the townsfolk of Berzanzo are happily celebrating the anniversary of scouring the Templar devils from the face of the Earth. Night falls, dry ice oozes from the ruined Abbey, and skeletal hands covered in rotting cowls slowly emerge from their tombs...

Back in Berzanzo, it's certainly no Fourth of July Picnic. The town's corrupt Mayor is busy ordering his goons to beat up Jack Marlowe, the American fireworks technician and ex-lover of local sexpot Vivian, whom the Mayor and at least one of his goons have their greasy eyes on. As the Templar's mummified army reaches the town square and hacks its way through the festivities, the core survivors seek sanctuary in a church, and then turn on each other one by one. It's like Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) – the tight confines bringing out the characters' latent jealousy, greed, selfishness and inhumanity – if zombies were clutching at the side of the raft. Particularly repellent is the Mayor, who thinks nothing of using his constituents as Templar bait. Vindication is the Templars, and the world finds itself a few assholes fewer.

As a film, Return Of The Evil Dead is much more suspenseful than a skeleton army in sackcloth should engender. The very appearance of the undead Templars and their modus operandi (blind but not deaf, my sweet pointed coccyx!) require a very serious leap of faith on the part of its audience, and yet, with those iconic soiled hoods and grinning skulls, they can't help but disturb. De Ossorio recycles many of the first Blind Dead's aural and visual tricks, such as the jarring slow-motion shots of the Templars on zombie horseback reinforcing their otherworldliness, and the soundtrack dripping with low moans and pitch-shifted bells. The set pieces are nothing short of fantastic: the village square massacre, the fate of hunchbacked cripple Murdo, and in an obvious nod to another Hitchcock film The Birds (1963), the young girl's heartstopping walk through the zombie sentinels (ALWAYS remember that in the case of an undead Armageddon, children are the weakest link). There are moments of intentional humour – the scenes with the governor and his saucy maid are nicely handled – but overall the tone is grim to the point of apocalyptic, and like other Spanish horrors of the early Seventies, equal parts gothic atmosphere and modern gore-soaked shock tactics.

“You have to be quiet!” yells one character, and I hope you do the same. Sit very still, and don't utter a sound until the end of Return Of The Evil Dead.