In the Cold of the Night (1990)

In the Cold of the Night is a 1990 erotic thriller directed by and co-written by Nico Mastorakis. 

To me this seems to be very much in the style of 80s gialli, especially Nothing Underneath (1985) and Too Beautiful To Die (1988). There’s the same arty/media/fashion world background and the same aura of wealth, glamour, style, sex and decadence. And like Nothing Underneath it has hints of the paranormal.

Scott Bruin (Jeff Lester) is a fashion photographer. He’s rich. He likes women. Lately he’s been having very unsettling dreams. Dreams about murdering a woman. He doesn’t recognise the woman in the dreams. The dreams are becoming very disturbing. At one point he finds himself trying to strangle his bed partner for the night.

And sometimes the dreams come when he’s awake. His vision becomes blurred but he’s definitely awake. Or he thinks he’s awake.

Then he sees the girl’s face on a T-shirt. It’s the girl from his dream. The girl he keeps killing in his dreams.

Then he meets Kimberly (Adrianne Sachs). She rides a motorcycle. She rides it into his studio. Then she takes him to her house. Only it isn’t her house. She’s house-sitting. It’s a palatial mansion, currently on the market for a cool 12 million. She takes him to the house on her bike. She rides the motorcycle right into the bedroom.

And she’s ridden her way into his heart. The sex is great. She’s intelligent and amusing. There’s only one problem. Where did she go to when she got into that BMW? Is there something about her that he doesn’t know?

And he’s still dreaming about killing her. In fact he tries to kill her. She forgives him. It’s just one of those things. He’s probably stressed. She’s a broadminded girl.

Of course he has to follow her the next time she gets into that BMW. Scott doesn’t understand anything that is going on. He just knows that he’s in love with Kimberly.

There’s something strange happening here. Several possibilities will suggest themselves. Scott could be insane. There could be paranormal influences at work. Somebody might be trying to gaslight Scott.

So far the movie is a straightforward erotic thriller with some serious dashes of neo-noir. Then suddenly it doesn’t just change direction. Now it’s on a whole different highway. Every assumption that the viewer has made turns out to be wrong. Every assumption that Scott has made turns out to be wrong. This is not the movie we thought it was. It may belong to a totally different genre.

There are hints in the early part of the movie as to what is really going on but you’ll probably overlook them because the direction in which they point is so crazy you won’t seriously entertain it. Mastorakis is actually being very clever here - he’s using our genre expectations against us.

The movie’s wild crazy change of direction is what I love about it. It’s the sort of thing I wasn’t expecting in a modestly budgeted direct-to-video movie. It’s more what I would have expected from a 1960s European movie, or maybe from someone like Brian De Palma. And, amusingly, there is a direct Brian De Palma reference in this movie. It won’t help you to figure out what’s going on because Mastorakis isn’t riffing on any particular De Palma movie but he is perhaps being a bit De Palma-esque.

Jess Lester as Scott is perhaps the weak link here. He’s a bit dull but he does do the “deer caught in the headlights” thing quite well and he does give the impression that Scott might be dangerous of pushed over the edge. Lester is reasonably OK.

Adrianne Sachs is OK as Kimberly. She does a fair job of making her enigmatic. Shannon Tweed is fine in a minor role.

For a direct-to-video the production values are high. It has that wonderful aesthetic of 80s excess. The atmosphere of wealth, glamour and decadence works well.

As I mentioned at the beginning it has a similar vibe to two great 80s gialli, Nothing Underneath and Too Beautiful To Die.

In the Cold of the Night is stylish, polished and well-made. It’s fast-paced, crazy and unpredictable. It’s very sexy, with some raunchy sex scenes. That’s the sort of thing that seem to unleash the snarkiness in a lot of reviewers. Which is a pity. It’s an erotic thriller. It’s supposed to be erotic. It is. I enjoyed this movie a whole lot. Highly recommended.

The Snow Woman (1968)

The Snow Woman is a 1968 Japanese gothic horror movie.

The first thing to note is that in Japanese (and Chinese) folklore the supernatural is treated in a way quite different from western folklore. Ghosts are not necessarily malevolent. And ghosts are corporeal. They can have sex. They can fall in love. Getting involved with ghosts can be dangerous, but not always. The boundary between the natural and supernatural worlds is not clear-cut. There are supernatural entities that are vaguely similar to the old western idea of the land of faerie - these entities are not evil as such but they’re dangerous because although they can look human their motivations are entirely alien. Witches are not quite the same as westerns ideas of witches.

And of course there’s no Satan as such, and not quite the same obsession with evil. There’s obviously no trace of the Christian concept of sin. Evil exists, but it’s viewed in a slightly different way.

The supernatural world can be tricky to deal with. It has to be approached with caution.

The setting is presumably some time during the Tokugawa Shogunate. It is certainly some time in the past. The Snow Woman begins with two men caught in a snowstorm in a forest. Shigetomo is a master sculptor. Yosaku (Akira Ishihama) is his pupil. Yosaku lives with Shigetomo and his wife. They are more or less his adoptive parents.

The two men are looking for a particular tree, a very special tree. From this tree Shigetomo will sculpt a statue of a goddess for a temple.

They encounter the Snow Woman. She is a supernatural creature although it might be an oversimplification to describe her as a witch. Yosaku survives the encounter. The Snow Woman thinks he’s so handsome that she cannot bear to harm him.

Shortly afterwards a very pretty young woman turns up at Shigetomo’s house. Her name is Yuki. It’s quickly obvious that Yosaku and Yuki are falling in love.

They get married and have a son.

On their wedding night Yosaku notices one odd thing about her. She is very cold. Not cold emotionally or sexually. She is a very loving wife. It’s just that her skin is strangely cold.

Of course we, the audience, know Yuki’s secret. She is, in some sense at least, the Snow Woman. She is not human. Or perhaps she is both a supernatural being and a human woman. During that encounter in the snowstorm she fell hopelessly in love with Yosaku. But she made a bargain with him, and part of the bargain was that he would remember nothing about that night.

Yosaku has been given the commission for that goddess statue that Shigetomo was supposed to carve. The commission has also been given to a rival sculptor. This is due to the machinations of the wicked Lord Jito. The sight of Yuki has awakened Lord Jito’s lusts. He will stop at nothing in order to have her. To achieve this he intends to destroy Yosaku.

Yuki must find a way to save herself and also her husband and herself.

The Snow Woman is a yōkai. These supernatural creatures can be malevolent, they can be benevolent or they can be neutral. Sometimes they’re merely mischievous. Sometimes they’re deadly. The Snow Woman in this movie is also somewhat vampiric.

The Snow Woman in the film does not just take on the physical form of a woman. She develops a woman’s emotions. We assume that in some way this is due to the power of love.

By 1968 filmmakers in Japan (and indeed in all countries) had developed astonishing skills in cinematography, lighting, makeup and practical effects. Skills which are now mostly lost. To do a remake of this movie today you would have to use CGI and it simply would not look as good.

Everything looks unreal, otherworldly and mysterious which is of course exactly right.

The Japanese were particularly good with makeup effects and the makeup work here is superb - it conveys an other-worldly feel without being in the least crude.

This movie was based one of Lafcadio Hearn’s retellings of Japanese ghost stories. If you haven’t read Lafcadio Hearn do so immediately. You will thank me. Start with Kwaidan.

This is a horror story, of sorts, although quite different from western horror films. Don’t expect non-stop thrills and gore. This is also a supernatural love story. Very highly recommended.

This film is included in the Radiance Film Japanese gothic horror Blu-Ray set. The transfer is immaculate.

Lady Frankenstein (1971)

You’re making a Frankenstein movie in 1971 but you want to add something different, to make your film look less like a rip-off of Hammer’s Frankenstein movies. So what do you do? You give Baron Frankenstein a beautiful sexy daughter who is also a mad scientist. And you make her the focus of the story. That’s the basis for Lady Frankenstein.

Of course you’ll need the right actress. How about Rosalba Neri? She’s sexy, glamorous, classy, she can act and she has the ability to be equally convincing as a heroine or a villainess. She turned out to be an inspired choice.

Joseph Cotten gets top billing but he actually has only a supporting role. This is totally a star vehicle for Rosalba Neri. She has to carry the film. And she does so with ease.

The setting is supposed to be England but it looks more like the Central Europe of Hammer’s gothic horror movies. In fact the whole visual style of this movie owes quite a lot to Hammer.

Lady Frankenstein adds some sleaze and some hints of sexual perversity. That was very much the trend in European horror at the time and Hammer were moving, a bit tentatively, in that direction. Lady Frankenstein goes a bit further than Hammer would dare to go.

Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten) and his assistant Dr Charles Marshall (Paul Muller) are on the verge of the final successful breakthrough in their attempts to create a living man out of dead tissue.

The problem is that the brain they are using comes from a hanged murderer and this brain has a few malfunctions. They create a man-monster and bring him to life but they can’t control him and Baron Frankenstein pays the price for his error of judgment.

In the 1931 Frankenstein there is of course a famous scene involving the monster, a child and a pond. In Lady Frankenstein this scene is a little different - the monster hurls a naked young woman into a lake, having surprised her having sex on the lakeshore with her young man. This is the monster’s first killing but there will be plenty more.

Baron Frankenstein’s daughter Tania (Rosalba Neri) vows to continue her father’s work, which Dr Marshall’s assistance. This is where the movie gets interesting. Tania Frankenstein is not a mere simplistic evil mad scientist. She has a number of simultaneous motivations. Ambition is one motivation but she is also driven by both lust and love. Tania has a woman’s emotional needs and a woman’s physical needs. Dr Marshall can satisfy the former and she is attracted by his mind but his weedy middle-ged body does not set her pulses racing. Maybe Tommy, her servant, can satisfy her sexual needs? He has a strong masculine body. Unfortunately he is a halfwit. Tania needs a man with both an exciting mind and an exciting body. If only the dumb-as-a-rock but hunky Tommy had Dr Marshall’s brain!

It’s always difficult to judge acting performances when they’re dubbed, but Rosalba Neri smoulders when she needs to smoulder and she’s convincingly depraved. Joseph Cotten is very good - he did quite a few exploitation movies in Italy around this time but in this instance at least he is not just phoning it in.

Mel Welles directs. He doesn’t have much of a reputation as a director but here he is at least competent. It’s visually reasonably impressive with a fairly cool mad scientist’s laboratory (which was re-used in several other movies) and manages not to look cheap.

The big problem is the very lame monster. It’s not a fatal flaw because the focus is very much on Tania Frankenstein and her romantic and erotic entanglements that lead her to become a fully-fledged evil mad scientist. But the monster is seriously lame.

Lady Frankenstein doesn’t push things very far on the gore front. There is however a fair bit of nudity and sex. The movie’s selling point was clearly going to be the sexy lady mad scientist.

The movie was shot in Italy and partly financed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. The version released in the States was cut, apparently not so much to remove sex and violence as to get the running time down to the length Corman wanted. With the cut scenes restored the plot makes a lot more sense and the motivations of the characters are a lot clearer.

Lady Frankenstein isn’t one of the gothic horror greats but it offers plenty of enjoyment. Highly recommended.

This movie is included in Severin’s Danza Macabra Volume 1 Blu-Ray boxed set and it gets a lovely transfer. There’s an audio commentary by Alan Jones and Kim Newman which, as you would expect from those two, is both illuminating and entertaining. And there’s a second audio commentary and other extras as well.

Sex and Fury (1973)

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The Night Porter (1974)

Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter was released in 1974 and ignited a firestorm of controversy. It dealt with forbidden and disturbing topics. It retains its power to shock, but interestingly enough not for quite the same reasons.

It is Vienna in 1957. Max (Dirk Bogarde) is the night porter in a luxury hotel. He had been a concentration camp guard during the war and had done some terrible things. He is on the list of wanted war criminals but he is considered to be too unimportant to make tracking him down worthwhile.

He belongs to an organisation of former SS officers. They protect each other by destroying incriminating evidence and occasionally eliminating witnesses. They conduct mock trials as a way of trying to exorcise their guilt feelings although at the same time that they try to deny those feelings. Max thinks they’re fools. The war was a long time ago. He just wants to live a quiet anonymous life. It’s not that he feels no guilt. He simply doesn’t see anything to be gained by dwelling on the past.

Then he runs into Lucia (Charlotte Rampling). They recognise each other. They knew each other very well during the war. Lucia was a prisoner at one of the camps. Max was a guard.

One thing that should be noted is that Lucia is not Jewish. She was sent to a concentration camp because she was the daughter of a communist and she was considered to be politically suspect. Liliana Cavani was inspired to make this movie after interviewing female camp survivors for a documentary. The women she interviewed had all been sent to the camps for being communists. Cavani clearly wanted her protagonist to be such a woman.

It’s perhaps worth noting that had Lucia been Jewish the film would have had zero chance of being released. The subject matter was already touchy enough.

Lucia is married to an orchestra conductor. But the wartime relationship between Max and Lucia cannot be left in the past. They rekindle the relationship which is, for various reasons, a very dangerous thing to do. Max’s old wartime comrades may well now decide to hunt down Max and Lucia.

The story in broad outline could have been made into a safe conventional politically acceptable movie but Cavani consistently choose bold options rather than safe options. She presumably had no interest in telling the kind of story that had already been told countless times.

The events during the war are told in brief flashbacks scattered throughout the movie.

The first safe option would have been to make it absolutely explicit that Lucia was forced into her wartime relationship with Max. But Cavani does not do this. Of course Lucia would have been under immense pressure but the matter is left uncertain.

That wartime relationship was complex. Max fell hopelessly in love with Lucia. Lucia’s emotions are left ambiguous but was is made quite explicit is that she was intensely sexually attracted to Max.

When the relationship is revived Max falls in love with Lucia all over again. This time it is obvious that Lucia is in love with him. And her sexual hunger for him is breathtaking.

It is also obvious that Lucia is now a very willing participant indeed. She leaves her husband to move in with Max.

The success of the movie depends to a huge degree on the ability of the two leads to sell this story to us. Dirk Bogarde is perfectly cast. He was superb at playing contradictory and ambiguous characters. The audience has to be able to see Lucia’s attraction to Max as plausible. Bogarde has the good looks, charm and self-confidence to do this. A young woman might well find such a man very very appealing. Bogarde also conveys to us Max’s dark side. He is a sadist. That’s why he excites Lucia so much. That’s something that Lucia likes in a man.

Rampling is superb. She easily convinces us of Lucia’s lust for Max but she keeps Lucia’s emotions just mysterious enough to keep us interested. Could she truly be madly in love with Max or is it just her sexual hunger? These are things that need to remain uncertain as long as possible.

This movie contains of the great cinematic sex scenes. It’s not graphic and it’s not erotic but it’s unbelievably intense.

In my view the wartime events are not in themselves a major focus except insofar as they represent lives lived in darkness. Cavani has said that Max and Lucia are two people trying to escape from the darkness into the light. Of course there is the darkness within them as well. Perhaps love can redeem them. Perhaps even Max can be redeemed by love. The idea of a war criminal being redeemed by love was certainly going tp push people’s buttons in 1974.

Max is a hunted man and he’s a man in love, and he’s a man in love. An audience is always going to be inclined to be at least a little sympathetic to such a character. On the other hand we know some of the things that Max has done. Our feelings about him are going to be a little conflicted, which one assumes was precisely what Cavani was aiming for.

There’s also the the fact that Lucia cannot be considered as a straightforward victim. Perhaps not a victim at all. Perhaps party a victim. Perhaps partly guilty. She knows the things that Max did during the war. Again we’re going to feel conflicted about this character.

1974 was about the time that Stockholm Syndrome was first identified and there is perhaps a touch of that here.

The Night Porter is confronting and provocative but we need confronting and provocative movies. Highly recommended.

King of the Rocket Men (1949 serial)

King of the Rocket Men is a 1949 Republic serial that mixes crime and science fiction. There are those who consider it to be the last great Republic serial.

Super-villain Dr Vulcan is murdering scientists at a company called Science Associates. Professor Millard decides it would be safer for him to feign death. He and Jess King (Tristram Coffin) hope to uncover the identity of Dr Vulcan. They know he has to be one of the key members of Science Associates’ staff.

Professor Millard and King have one ace up their sleeve. It’s Millard’s new invention, a rocket suit. With its aid Jeff King becomes Rocket Man.

Being able to fly though the air is certainly a useful attribute.

There are quite a few gee-whizz inventions. There’s the rocket suit, a kind of death ray machine and Dr Vulcan has a few communications and surveillance gadgets.

The plot however is reasonably solid and isn’t too outlandish, being essentially a tense but straightforward crime thriller. The plot isn’t entirely reliant on the gadgetry. It’s a good formula. Adding too many fantastic elements was a temptation that made some serials seem a bit silly but this one mostly feels grounded in reality.

And in 1949 a rocket suit would have seemed like a plausible near-future scientific advancement.

The cliffhangers are not quite as imaginative as those that William Witney and John English provided in classic serials like Spy Smasher and Daredevils of the Red Circle but they’re still pretty effective.

The pacing is good, with plenty of action scenes. The fights are well staged. 

The hero and the villain seem evenly matched. Both are intelligent, both have some cool technology, both are determined.

Dr Vulcan isn’t a crazed megalomaniac. He doesn’t seek world domination. He just wants money. He’s a plain old-fashioned gangster.

The special effects are terrific. The flying sequences are exciting and look convincing. They looked convincing in 1949 and they still look surprisingly convincing today. And the flying sequences are imaginative. Clearly a lot of thought was put into coming up with ideas for ways in which the hero could use his rocket suit.

That rocket suit with its full-face helmet looks cool.

The stunt work is good as well.

Budgets for serials were getting tighter by this time but King of the Rocket Men doesn’t suffer too much from this. It’s slick and well-made and looks thoroughly professional. It manages to look more expensive than it was.

The pacing is pretty good and the action scenes are handled well.

You don’t win Oscars for acting in serials but the cast members acquit themselves quite satisfactorily.

This is not far future sci-fi in the Buck Rogers mould. This is more cutting edge super-technology in the present day sci-fi. Actual rocket back packs were developed at the beginning of the 1960s. It’s a crime thriller with futuristic gadgetry.

If you’re a fan of movie serials you’ll want to see this one. King of the Rocket Men is a lot of fun and it’s highly recommended.

This serial is available on DVD as a two-disc set from Cheezy Flicks. The transfer is acceptable.

Lost Highway (1997)

Lost Highway is a 1997 David Lynch film that received a mixed reception at the time.

It certainly establishes a weird disturbing atmosphere right from the start. Everything is normal, and also somehow wrong. We see a house. Everything is as it should be but it’s oddly disturbing.

We meet jazz musician Fred Madison (Bill Pullman). He has a very attractive wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette). It seems like an ordinary marriage. Then we see them making love. That’s normal but the music on the soundtrack is spectacularly inappropriate. It wouldn’t matter what kind of sex scene this was, whether it was romantic or sleazy or desperate or passionate, this music would be spectacularly inappropriate. Lynch is trying to make us see perfectly ordinary things as weird and unsettling.

They keep getting videotapes in the mail. It seems that somebody has been filming them, inside their own house. This creeps them out, naturally.

Then we see Fred walking into a strange hall of darkness. This is a David Lynch movie. It could be a portal to another reality, or a portal from one dream world to another.

Fred finds himself convicted of murder. He is on Death Row.

The guards get a shock when they check his cell. He has gone. There’s another guy in the call, a guy who should not be there. This guy is a young punk named Pete Dayton, a guy who is pretty harmless. Pete has not done anything. No-one knows how he got into the cell.

So where has Fred gone? Good question. We’re now following Pete’s story.

Pete has a girlfriend, Sheila. They have lots of hot sex.

Pete is mixed up in some ways with an ageing big time gangster, Mr Eddy. Mr Eddy is terrifyingly violent. He could give lessons to Frank Booth. Mr Eddy has a gorgeous young blonde mistress, Alice Wakefield. The sexual sparks are immediately flying between Pete and Alice. They begin a wild sexual affair. If Mr Eddy finds out they’re both dog food.

Shortly thereafter the movie begins to make less sense. It makes less sense every minute.

There’s lots of incredibly brutal violence. I’m not a fan of excessive violence but I’m open-minded about it. If it’s your thing that’s fine. There’s lots of steamy sex. And Lynch does erotic scenes quite well - sexy but a bit edgy.

Lynch indulged in plenty of weirdness in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart and those films also challenged the viewer to question the reality of reality. But they had some coherence. They engaged the viewer’s interest. There was a reason to keep watching.

Lost Highway is in some ways a step backwards to the incomprehensible weirdness for its own sake of Eraserhead. If you loved Eraserhead you’ll probably love Lost Highway. If like me you hated Eraserhead then you might consider Lost Highway to be 134 minutes of soul-crushing tedium.

There’s lot of spooky surreal crazy stuff but since there’s nothing happening in the movie that we could possibly care about those moments come across as self-indulgence.

We cannot be sure of the identity of any of the characters. They do not seem to have fixed identities. They have no personalities. We do not know why they do any of the things they do. All of which makes this movie exciting to film school types. When talking about the movie they get to use the words subversive and transgressive a lot and that makes them very happy.

Lynch loves bad acting. Given that his films do not take place in the real world and that his characters are probably not real people that perhaps makes some sense. It obviously makes sense to David Lynch. This time he has excelled himself, assembling a cast of breathtakingly bad actors.

The interesting thing about Lost Highway is that as it gets weirder it gets less disturbing. Things disturb us when they threaten our belief in a stable ordered world of reality. But when the movie abandons even the slightest connection to reality we cease to be disturbed because we no longer care.

There is a way of interpreting this movie that makes perfect sense but the trouble is that it can make you cease to care about anything that happens. Of course there are other possible interpretations that avoid that pitfall but to me they’re not as convincing as the simple interpretation.

This is a much bleaker much more nihilistic film than either Blue Velvet or Wild at Heart. Watching it is a gruelling experience. I personally prefer Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart because they don’t take the easy option of embracing despair and nihilism.

I can see plenty of things to admire in Lost Highway but I have to say I did not really enjoy it. It just didn’t grab me. But it’s one of Lynch’s key films and most Lynch fans like it much more than I did and for those reasons it’s recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Wild at Heart (1990) and Blue Velvet (1986) which I personally consider to be Lynch’s two masterpieces.