The Sentinel (1977)

The Sentinel is a 1977 supernatural horror/occult thriller movie written and directed by Michael Winner. Or at least it might be supernatural horror, or it might not be.

I’m going to lay my cards on the table right at the start. I don’t care what anyone says I like Michael Winner as a director.

We start with a bunch of Catholic priests in Italy and they seem to be very concerned not just about evil in general but about some specific manifestation of evil.

Then the scene shifts to New York. Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) is a successful model. Her lawyer boyfriend Michael (Chris Sarandon) wants to marry her. They’ve been living together for two years. Alison says she needs space. She wants her own apartment.

She is troubled by a bizarre childhood memory. It involves her father, and possibly satanic influences.

She finds a nice apartment. Maybe she should have been suspicious when she found out that such a nice apartment was available for such a low rental but the real estate agent, Miss Logan (Ava Gardner), seems very reassuring.

Some of her new neighbours are a bit odd. Charles Chazen (Burgess Meredith) is a crazy old guy who lives with his cat and his parakeet but he’s very sweet and very friendly.

The two lesbians are more worrying. And the twins. Even fact all of the neighbours are worrying in various ways.

The noises from upstairs are disturbing.

Alison really starts to worry after she asks Miss Logan about the neighbours.

We might wonder a bit about that disturbing childhood memory. Is it a real memory? Could it be a false memory? Or just a dream? Or even a demonically inspired dream? Or is she remembering things that she misinterpreted at the time?

This is a “supernatural evil in the modern world” movie. But this is one of those movies that may or may not be actually about supernatural horror. Everything we see could have non-supernatural explanations. Somebody could be gaslighting Alison. Or Alison may in fact be crazy. That’s a possibility that will occur to us, and it occurs to Alison as well.

Alison goes to investigate those noises upstairs and she thinks she kills an old man. It might be her father. But her father died several weeks earlier. And the only blood the police find is Alison’s blood.

Detective Gatz (Eli Wallach) is worried by several things, principally by a case a few years earlier. A case that could have a link to these recent events.

Winner cleverly keeps things mysterious. He offers us nothing substantial that would back any of the theories we might have come up with to explain what is going on. He slowly builds an atmosphere of menace and paranoia but keeps it vague, which of course makes it all the more unsettling.

Alison is a really nice girl. She might be a really nice sane girl, or a really mad girl. Other characters are ambiguous as well.

And there’s still that niggling suspicion that supernatural evil might be at work.

I’m being deliberately very vague because I think this is a movie you’ll appreciate a lot more if you go into it not knowing what kind of movie it’s going to turn out to be.

Burgess Meredith gives the most memorable performance but all the cast members are fine. John Carradine is quite something as well. Cristina Raines and Chris Sarandon are effectively ambiguous. Look out for Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum in small roles.

The unease mounts remorselessly. The ending really is worth the wait. This is a movie that delivers the goods. Highly recommended.

The Universal Blu-Ray is barebones but looks good.

Darkman (1990)

Darkman, released in 1990, was one of a number of comic book or comic book-inspired action movies made in the early to mid 90s. Other notable examples being Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer, The Shadow and The Phantom. All were expected to launch franchises but for various reasons this didn’t happen (although there were a couple of direct-to-video Darkman movies). Darkman was in fact commercially very successful.

Sam Raimi directed and co-wrote the script.

Genius scientist Dr Peyton Westlake (Liam Neeson) is working on a new type of synthetic skin. His girlfriend Julie Hastings (Frances McDormand) is a lawyer but despite this she’s one of the good guys. She has tumbled upon a corruption scandal involving property developer Louis Strack (Colin Friels). She has an incriminating memo. A bunch of goons led by the sinister Robert Durant (Larry Drake) break into Peyton’s laboratory and then blow it up. Peyton is assumed to have perished but he survived, horribly disfigured. His new synthetic skin invention won’t help because it’s unstable. It disintegrates after a short period of time.

The skin however can be useful as a temporary measure and Peyton uses it it to get his revenge.

An enormous amount of mayhem ensues.

This movie was not based on an actual comic book. It was an original story by Sam Raimi. Comic books were a very obvious influence, along with 1930s pulp novels such as The Shadow, 1930/40s movie serials and the Universal gothic horror movies of the 30s. Darkman certainly achieves an extraordinary comic-book vibe. And since it’s an original story there were no pesky rights issues to worry about.

It was also clearly an attempt to ride on the coat-tails of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman mega-hit. Darkman has some traces of the urban gothic feel of Batman but it has a flavour of its own. It has an aesthetic perfectly suited to a comic-book movie.

Liam Neeson is an actor I’ve never thought about one way or the other. He’s fine here and does the brooding tragic thing well.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Frances McDormand’s performance but it’s too bland for a movie such as this which demands larger-than-life performances.

This movie is dominated by its villains. Colin Friels is deliciously oily and slimy. Larry Drake as Durant is properly menacing and sadistic.

What distinguishes Darkman from the other comic book style movies of the 90s is that Raimi was coming from a horror background so it has more overt horror moments, and the Darkman makeup effects are genuinely gruesome.

What makes it fun is that the horror is combined with so much goofiness and so many hyperactive action scenes.

You’re not meant to take his movie even a tiny bit seriously. There’s a lot of black comedy. It’s all very tongue-in-cheek.

Some of the action scenes are amazingly silly and totally unbelievable but it doesn’t matter. This is the world of comic books. The crazier the action scenes the better, as long as they’re done with energy. And this movie has immense amounts of energy. The suspended-from-a-helicopter scenes are ludicrously over-the-top and implausible but comic book heroes can do those sorts of things.

Raimi had a modest budget to work with. Some of the special effects are a bit iffy but Raimi figured that if they were done at sufficiently breakneck pace it wouldn’t matter, and he was right.

The production design, given the limited budget, is impressive. This is a cool dark fantasy world.

Don’t bother giving any thought to the plot. It’s a standard revenge plot and it’s full of holes but if you have plenty of beer and popcorn on hand you won’t care. There is an attempt to add a tragic aspect to the story and that works quite well.

Darkman is just pure hyperkinetic crazy fun. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. Highly recommended.

Darkman looks pretty good on Blu-Ray.

Human Desires (Indecent Behaviour 4, 1997)

Human Desires, released in 1997, also goes by the title Indecent Behaviour 4 although I’m told it has little connection to the earlier films in that series. This is a direct-to-video erotic thriller starring Shannon Tweed so of course most people have already decided it’s junk before even watching it. There are actually a couple of slightly odd things about this movie that make it interesting.

It’s a private eye thriller with lots of sex and nudity. Again, to a lot of people that means it must be junk. So most people go straight into Snark Mode. Almost every online review you read will tell you that this is just a softcore movie with zero plot. That’s nonsense. It has a perfectly serviceable plot.

It begins with a pyjama party thrown by Alicia Royale (Shannon Tweed). She and her husband Miles (Ashby Adams) run a top-flight fashion modelling agency. They’re looking for a model to headline a major campaign for their biggest client. There’s a lot of money in it for the agency. There’s a lot of money in it for the girl. It will catapult her straight into the ranks of the supermodels.

There are three contenders - Julia (Peggy Trentini), Zoe (Dawn Ann Billings) and Melinda (Lisa Nohea).

Then Julia is found floating face down in the swimming pool. It appears to be suicide.

Dean Thomas (Christian Noble) was out of place at the party. He’s a down-at-heel private eye. As luck would have it Dean and Zoe are the ones who discover Julia’s body.

Zoe wants to hire Dean to investigate. She suspects murder. Dean isn’t interested. He’s an ex-cop but he likes being a PI because missing persons cases, background checks and exposing straying wives who are having affairs is easy work and it’s safe work. He’s not Mike Hammer. He doesn’t want to be Mike Hammer. He has no interest in murder cases.

Dean eventually takes the case because of Maria. Five years earlier he was a cop. Maria was an informant. He got involved with her. He fell in love with her, and that led him to make a mistake that got her killed.

His motivation for taking this case is not quite guilt. He just doesn’t like seeing women get murdered and he doesn’t like it when their killers get away with it. Maria’s killer got away with it.

And there is a chance it was murder. The cops think it was suicide but they don’t rule out murder. They don’t however think there’s any chance of proving it and they have other cases to deal with. They haven’t closed this case but they’re not actively pursuing it.

What I like about his movie is that Dean is not a standard movie PI. He doesn’t do the tough guy routine. That’s not what real PIs do. If you’re a PI and you’re spending a great deal of time beating guys up or getting beaten up you’re in the wrong job. PIs gather evidence. They try to keep out of trouble. That’s what Dean does. He doesn’t get into a single fistfight in the whole movie.

On the other hand he is a trained investigator. He does know how to gather evidence and he knows how to connect different pieces of evidence. He’s competent when it comes to routine investigations.

I like the fact that Human Desires ignores a lot of standard PI thriller clichés. Miles wants to pressure Dean into dropping his investigation. We know what will happen next. Dean will get roughed up by hoods. That’s what happens in PI movies. But it doesn’t happen here. Miles is not a nice guy but he’s not a gangster. He runs a modelling agency. In the world of high fashion you don’t send guys to break other guy’s legs. Miles doesn’t even get his head of security, tough ex-cop Roddy Daniels (Duke Stroud), to threaten Dean. Roddy just begs Dean to back off.

So, surprisingly perhaps, these people behave like real people not crime thriller stereotypes.

There are half a dozen suspects. All have movies, but not one has a motive sufficiently overwhelming to enable us to be sure of their guilt.

The acting is generally quite adequate.

The biggest problem is director Ellen Earnshaw. She’s good on pacing but she doesn’t know how to direct sex scenes. All the sex scenes here are the same. She makes no attempt to add visual interest by shooting different sex scenes in slightly different ways, with different setting, different lighting, different camera angles. It’s one of the oddities of softcore cinema that male directors make sex scenes much more genuinely erotic because they put more imagination into them. The sex scenes here are steamy enough but they just blend into one another.

Human Desires has lots of sex and T&A but it has a decent enough thriller story. If that sounds like your thing it’s recommended. I have to confess that I rather enjoyed it.

Human Desires is available on DVD paired with another interesting (although flawed) Shanon Tweed movie, Illicit Dreams.

The Monk (1972)

The Monk is a movie I’ve been searching for for quite a while. I was delighted to find it on DVD. Not the greatest transfer perhaps but it is in the correct aspect ratio at least. This is a movie that definitely needs a full restoration and a Blu-Ray release. It was a Franco-Italian-German co-production shot in English.

It’s based on Matthew Gregory Lewis’s 1796 gothic novel of the same name. This is one of the most notorious most outrageous novels of all time. If you’re telling yourself that a novel written in 1796 couldn’t possibly still be shocking today then think again. The Monk still packs a punch.

It’s necessary to keep in mind that anti-Catholic bigotry was a major strain in English culture (both high culture and pop culture) from the 16th century right through to the 20th century. Anti-Catholicism was a common theme in the first wave of gothic fiction which lasted from 1764 up to around 1820. It found its most spectacular flowering in Lewis’s The Monk.

The gothic fiction of that early period invariably has hints of the supernatural but it almost always turns out that nothing was actually involved. The Monk is unusual in that it has overt and explicit supernatural elements.

This movie certainly has some horror an exploitation elements but it has some definite art-house credentials as well. The script was co-written by Luis Buñuel no less (with Jean-Claude Carrière).

In fact Buñuel had been hoping to film the novel since the 1950s.

For various reasons Buñuel lost interest in directing and the assignment was given to Greek director Ado Kyrou. The script by Buñuel and Carrière was retained.

The setting is presumably Spain, probably in the 17th century. Ambrosio (Franco Nero) is a monk renowned for his piety and wisdom, and especially for his passionate belief in the vital importance of chastity. Ambrosio is admired by all.

He is becoming a little worried about Brother John. Brother John is in fact a gorgeous young woman, Mathilde (Nathalie Delon), masquerading as a man. We will later discover that her motives are less than innocent. Even wearing a cowl nobody could possibly mistake Mathilde for a man. This might of course be a deliberate touch, perhaps an attempt to capture the somewhat outlandish feel of the early gothic novels with unlikely coincidences and implausible disguises.

Mathilde has no trouble seducing Ambrosio. He is wracked by guilt but he can’t give her up.

Mathilde has clearly awakened Ambrosio’s interest in women. He becomes obsessed with a young girl, Antonia. Antoni’s mother is very ill. Ambrosio offers her spiritual comfort but he’d like to offer Antonia comfort of a more carnal nature. By this time Ambrosio has surrendered to the pleasures of the flesh but with the added spice of lots and lots of guilt.

Mathilde tells the wretched monk that there is a way he can have Antonia. Mathilde has commerce with demons. She can summon a demon who will deliver Antonia into his hands. Ambrosio is horrified but his lusts have now taken control of him.

The wealthy and debauched and incredibly wicked Duke of Talamur (Nicol Williamson) also has an interest in Antonia. The Duke is a noted philanthropist. He is always looking for ways to help the unfortunate, especially if the unfortunate happen to be very young girls.

Needless to say these wicked goings-on attract the attention of the Inquisition. It seems that nothing can save Ambrosio.

The cast is fine. Franco Nero did this sort of thing well. On the subject of the blending of art and exploitation in this movie it’s worth noting that is star, Franco Nero, was an actor who shuttled happily back and forth between art movies and exploitation movies and popular commercial movies. Nathalie Delon as Mathilde is suitably wicked. Nicol Williamson oozes corruption and evil and uber-creepiness from every pore.

This movie really needed Buñuel at the helm. Ado Kyrou clearly has no feel for the material. The sleaze and trashiness is there in the source material and the movie doesn’t back away from admitting that shocking things are going on but the style is dull and too arty. With Buñuel unavailable it might perhaps have been better to pick a director with more of an exploitation movie sensibility. It would have been interesting to see Jess Franco let loose on this material. Alice Arno as Mathilde could have been awesome.

This movie came out the same year as Ken Russell’s The Devils. That’s the kind of approach The Monk needed. The Monk definitely needed some visual flamboyance and outrageousness.

The ending is cringe. The Monk just doesn’t make it. The 70s was the time when a great adaptation of the novel could have been made but this film represents a misfire and a lost opportunity.

Naked Vengeance (1985)

Naked Vengeance is a 1985 erotic thriller and we’re clearly in direct-to-video territory here. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of 80s/90s direct-to-video movies are get fun. But then you see the dreaded words “directed by Cirio H. Santiago” in the credits and you know that this is going to be total schlock.

This is one of those movies that reeks of middle-class urbanites’ fear and loathing for working-class and rural Americans. It reflects their firm conviction that once you pass the city limits of a major burg such as L.A. everyone is an inbred low-life redneck thug. In this case it’s done in such a clumsy heavy-handed obvious way that it’s almost comical. But given that the director was a Filipino and the co-writer and producer was Indian maybe it just reflects an intense dislike for Americans.

Carla Harris (Deborah Tranelli) is a former actress married to a rich L.A. businessman. He is killed trying to save a young woman who was being attacked in a parking lot.

Carla flees back to her rural home town to live with her parents. Maybe she’s seeking security but as soon as she arrives it’s obvious that she regards the town and everyone in it with a wealthy city-dweller’s contempt for small-town America, and they hate her for being from the city.

Within a day half the men in the town in the town have tried to rape her.

The sheriff is unsympathetic. He thinks she’s a snooty stuck-up city rich bitch.

Of course the men in the town get together to go to her house (or rather her parents’ house) to teach her a lesson while her parents are away for the weekend and it ends in horror and mayhem.

Carla ends up in a mental hospital in a catatonic state. Or so it appears. But maybe she’s not so catatonic. And maybe she’s out for revenge. Maybe she even has plans for getting her revenge.

Lots of mayhem ensues.

This is in many ways a very bad movie. It’s technically a bit slapdash. Santiago’s direction is fairly uninspired. Don’t expect any visual flourishes. It’s all done by the numbers.

You could drive an 18-wheeler through the plot holes. After the night of mayhem at Carla’s parents’ house we’re expected to believe that the cops could not find a single piece of forensic evidence even after half a dozen guys had run amok. And apparently it never occurred to the cops to have Carla physically examined.

When Carla starts wreaking vengeance her victims take no precautions even though they know that she intends to kill them one by one.

Deborah Tranelli isn’t too bad but apart from her the acting is breathtakingly awful. It doesn’t help that every character is no more than a standard type, with zero depth.

On the other hand the murder scenes as Carla stalks her victims are done reasonably well. Santiago wasn’t much of a director but violent action scenes were something he could do. There’s plenty of carnage and gallons of blood but there’s also some real energy here and even a certain amount of imagination. The speedboat scene and scene at the car repair shop are grisly but rather good.

There’s some nudity and the scene in which Carla is violated by the bad guys would require a whole raft of trigger warnings today. It is a confronting scene but it is necessary. We have to feel that Carla has some justification for her bloody campaign of revenge.

There’s an amusing homage to the 1931 Frankenstein movie but I won’t spoil things by saying any more.

Naked Vengeance is sleazy and grimy but sleazy and grimy are not necessarily bad things. It’s a badly made movie with a very very thin script but with enough beer and popcorn you might get some fun out of it.

Shout! Factory’s Blu-Ray transfer looks pretty good.

Santiago did manage to make one genuinely entertaining movie, the pleasingly crazed Firecracker (AKA Naked Fist, 1981).

Yeti Giant of the 20th Century (1977)

Yeti Giant of the 20th Century is a Canadian-Italian co-production and it’s very very obviously a King Kong rip-off. That’s A-OK by me. I love Italian rip-offs of Hollywood blockbusters.

This time it’s not a giant ape on a remote island but a yeti frozen for a million years in the ice in northern Canada. Now I know what you’re thinking. That’s a long way from the Himalayas. But what if yetis were found across the whole globe at one time?

Billionaire tycoon Morgan Hunnicut (Edoardo Faieta) has funded the expedition to retrieve the yeti. His pal, palaeontologist Professor Wassermann (John Stacy), thinks the yeti can be revived. And he’s right!

Hunnicut’s teenaged granddaughter Jane (Antonella Interlenghi) and her kid brother are on hand when the yeti is brought back from the north. Jane thinks the yeti is really sweet. OK, he’s thirty feet tall but she’s sure he’s just as gentle and friendly as her puppy dog Indio.

The yeti really is friendly but he’s easily frightened and when he’s frightened he can cuse mass destruction.

Hunnicut’s plan is to use the yeti as a publicity stunt for his business empire. What he doesn’t know is that there is a traitor in his company, a guy actually working for a competitor that wants the yeti put out of the way.

Of course the bad guy manages to engineer a situation in which the yeti seems to have killed some people so soon the Canadian cops are hunting down the poor yeti.

Jane is determined to save her gentle gigantic snap-frozen friend. Much mayhem ensues.

So it’s all pretty close to the original King Kong.

This was clearly a low-budget effort but when Italians make a movie such as this you know that even if the special effects are cheap they’ll be fun. Italians in those days couldn’t make a dull movie if they tried.

There are some cool visual moments. The yeti locked in what looks like a giant red telephone box suspended from a helicopter is pretty cool.

Hunnicut isn’t really a villain. He wants to make money out of the yeti but he really does also want to help Professor Wassermann’s legitimate scientific research. And Hunnicut has no desire to see the yeti harmed. He has no desire to see anyone get hurt.

The acting in general is OK. There’s a nicely slimy villain.

Antonella Interlenghi as Jane is no Fay Wray (or Jessica Lange) but she’s likeable and cute.

I like Mimmo Crao as lot as the yeti. The makeup effects allow us to see his facial expressions and he does a fine job of conveying the yeti’s animal-like nature - a gentle timid creature but very easily spooked and inclined to lash out in fear. This movie needs a sympathetic monster and the yeti is very sympathetic indeed.

The major weakness is the lack of a really spectacular show-stopping visual set-piece.

The ending marks a significant departure from King Kong. It’s perhaps not entirely satisfactory but I think it works.

Yeti Giant of the 20th Century is sentimental but it’s good-natured and enjoyable and has some pleasing goofiness. This is a pure beer and popcorn movie. Recommended.

Yeti Giant of the 20th Century looks terrific on Blu-Ray.

Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (1974)

Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll is a 1974 Spanish giallo starring Paul Naschy. 

Early on there is perhaps some doubt about its genre categorisation but it does get more and more giallo-esque as it goes.

Naschy is Gilles, a drifter looking for a job. The suggestion is made that the three sisters who live in a big house on the outskirts of the village might employ him, although the way the suggestion is put could lead one to suspect that working for the sisters might not be the best of ideas. 

He gets the job anyway and it’s a live-in job.

The eldest sister Claude (Diana Lorys) has a badly disfigured arm as the result of an accident. She is convinced that men now find her repulsive. Her sister Ivette (Maria Perschy) is wheelchair-bound, presumably as the result of the same accident. And then there’s the man-hungry Nicole (Eva León).

The sisters all take note of Gilles’ manly physique when they see stripped to the waist chopping firewood. They like what they see. So now we have Gilles living in a house with three women. They all seek potentially dangerous. All three seem crazy. And, for very different reasons, Claude and Nicole are so sexually frustrated that they’re climbing the walls.

Gilles is by no means immune to their feminine charms.

Then the nurse arrives and there’s something about her that makes us wonder if she’s everything that she seems to be.

A guy suddenly turns up and tries to kill Gilles.

Three cute teenage backpackers arrive in the village. They’re looking for fun. These girls spell fun M-E-N.

Gilles has disturbing dreams, or perhaps they’re flashbacks.

There’s plenty of potential now for mayhem, and there’s a brutal murder. It won’t be the last murder.

There are at least half a dozen very plausible suspects. All of these people are either twisted in some way, or we suspect that they may be twisted in some way. Their motives might be rational or totally irrational.

As usual with his movies Paul Naschy wrote the screenplay and for the most part he plays fair with us. The resolution gets a bit wild and outrageous but it works. For me a successful mystery story is one in which I find the ending believable because the clues pointing in the right direction were there and it feels psychological plausible. That’s the case here. There’s a respect for the conventions of the mystery genre, and that’s not always the case with a giallo.

There is some gore and there are some disturbing moments.

There’s not much in the way of nudity and sex but there is an all-pervasive atmosphere of unhealthy eroticism, and that applies to both the male and the female characters.

Naschy’s performance is very good. He is able to convince us that GiIles is a decent good-natured guy and he’s also able to convince us that there’s at least the possibility of some inner darkness. All of the performances are solid with Diana Lorys and Maria Perschy being particularly good. And Eva León as Nicole oozes sex is a delightfully over-the-top way.

Carlos Aured was the director and co-writer and he worked with Naschy several times. He does a fine stylish imaginative job here. The house in which the three sisters live is a perfect setting for a giallo and Aured takes every advantage of it.

Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll is a top-tier giallo. Highly recommended.

The transfer (in Shout! Factory’s Paul Naschy Collection Blu-Ray set) is in the 1.37 aspect ratio which is possibly incorrect but it looks OK.

I’ve reviewed Naschy’s other foray into the giallo genre, A Dragonfly for Each Corpse (1975), and it’s very much worth seeing.