Jess Franco's Eugenie (1970)

Jess Franco has made several moves based on works by the Marquis de Sade, including his 1970 film Eugenie... the Story of Her Journey Into Perversion, inspired by de Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir. A young woman is lured to an island owned by an older woman and her brother. The older woman seduces her, and them, under the influence of various drugs, she is introduced to the pleasures and pains of sexual produced inspired by de Sade’s writings. This is a very erotic film, but it’s also a serious film, and a serious attempt to grapple with some of de Sade’s ideas. If you disapprove of sex and nudity you’ll find much to offend you, by then if such things offend you really shouldn’t be watching a Jess Franco movie anyway. At his best Franco has the ability to combine eroticism, art and ideas, and this is one of his most successful films. Among the extras on the DVD is a rather good documentary, in which Christopher Lee (perhaps surprisingly in view of Lee’s somewhat conservative moral views) expresses a good deal of admiration for Franco as a film-maker. Incidentally this movie is not to be confused with another of Franco's movies of the same period, entitled Eugenie de Sade (also a rather good movie).

Bad Timing (1980)

At one point fairly early on in Nic Roeg’s 1980 film Bad Timing we see Alex (Art Garfunkel) giving a lecture to his students on spying. And spying, voyeurism and an obsessive need to investigate, especially an obsessive need to investigate those we love, are themes that run continuously throughout this movie. Alex must know everything about his girlfriend Milena (Theresa Russell); for Alex knowledge is power, knowledge gives him control, and Alex wants to be always in control. But how much can we ever understand about another person? Despite all his efforts Alex never does understand Milena. Milena’s understanding of Alex comes late, and at a heavy cost. The film opens with Milena in an ambulance on the way to hospital in Vienna after a overdose of sleeping pills. The rest of the film is in the form of flashbacks intercut with yet another form of investigation, this being the investigation carried out by an Austrian police inspector, played by Harvey Kietel.

Bad Timing’s probings into the human psyche and into the darker realms of love and sex are certainly disturbing. As with so many of Roeg’s films we see sex scenes intercut with other scenes, in this case intercut with scenes of emergency surgery on the unconscious Milena. The cutting of this film is breath-taking. The key scenes showing what really happened at the apartment after Milena’s phone call to Alex are very unsettling indeed. Garfunkel is superb. Russell is simply brilliant, and Kietel and Denholm Elliott (who plays Milena’s husband) are also excellent. A magnificent film. The Criterion disc contains extremely interesting interviews with both Roeg and Theresa Russell.

Kitten with a Whip (1964)

There’s nothing like a good 1950s or early 1960s juvenile delinquent movie, from the days when every decent family lived in dread that their children would turn into juvenile delinquents, or become communists or dope fiends. There were just so many threats to decency and family values to worry about! And Kitten with a Whip, from 1964, is a classic of the genre. Ann-Margret is bad girl Jody, who breaks into the house of squeaky clean ultra-respectable aspiring politician John Forsythe. She then decides to enjoy the high life at his expense, by threatening to scream rape if he calls the police. Poor old John Forsythe’s worst nightmare comes true when some of her friends arrive and decide it’s party time. They’re even more dangerous than she is – one of them even sounds suspiciously like a pacifist, and we all know how dangerous they are. And they even quote poetry, so we know there is no limit to their depravity. So Mr Political Hopeful’s life spirals out of control and he finds himself taking a walk on the wild side.

Of course we realise fairly early on why Jody went bad, when we see her reading comic books. No wonder those crazy kids don’t believe in anything any more. As in all films of this genre respectability and virtue prevails at the end and we see the shocking price that must be paid by kids who go bad. But Kitten with a Whip is enormously entertaining, it has an amazingly frenetic jazz soundtrack, it has incredible energy, it is (naturally) unintentionally screamingly funny in places, and it boasts an unbelievably hyper and totally over-the-top performance by Ann-Margret. She bounces from one extreme emotion to another, and from cold calculating wicked woman to poor frightened little girl lost in the big bad world. It’s a performance that, surprisingly, works extremely well. This movie works superbly as a camp classic and I highly recommend it. The “so bad it’s good” thing very rarely works out in practice, but in this case it does. And the movie has a real style to it.

Dracula (1979)

Until now I’d avoided seeing the 1979 John Badham-directed Dracula, largely because I’d heard so many very negative things about it. In fact it’s rather good. Although it was a fairly big-budget release by a major studio its poor commercial performance at the time and its neglect since then make it a classic example of a mainstream movie that becomes a cult film. It does have some faults, Laurence Olivier’s excruciatingly hammy performance as van Helsing being one of them, but its strengths more than outweigh its weaknesses. This is very much a film that focuses on the erotic aspects of the story, and it’s very much in the modern tradition of sympathetic portraits of Dracula. Frank Langella as the Count is young, charming, charismatic, sexy and pretty. The best thing about the movie is the portrayal of Lucy. In this version Mina is van Helsing’s daughter and his first victim, while the main focus of the movie is the relationship between Dracula and Lucy. Lucy is no passive victim. She’s a willing and active partner for the Count, and the relationship is more romantic and more erotically charged than anything in Coppola’s 1992 version. The casting of the astonishingly dreary Trevor Eve (who out-Keanus Keanu Reeves in the bad acting stakes) as Jonathan Harker is interesting – it really emphasises the class conflict between the aristocratic vampire lord and his petty, life-denying, dull and unimaginative bourgeois foes. For Lucy Dracula represents her only chance to escape a life of stultifying boredom and oppression. Dracula and Lucy are the hero and heroine of this film, make no mistake about that. Only the most puritanical, stolid and cheerless viewer could possibly see the vampire hunters as the good guys. It’s a movie to enrage those who like their vampires to be simple and unambiguous monsters.

The movie looks quite good. Although at times the production design is a little conventional it does have a few stunning visual moments. The climax is particularly well done. The ending will upset vampire movie traditionalists, but I thought it was original, striking and rather effective. This Dracula tries to do a lot of the things that Coppola’s version tries to do, and I think it does them better. It’s more supernatural love story than horror movie perhaps, but Frank Langella is superb, Kate Nelligan gives Lucy both strength and complexity, Donald Pleasence is outrageously entertaining (as always) as Lucy’s father Dr Seward. Tony Haygarth is a disappointing Renfield though – he must have thought they were making Carry On Dracula. If you like your vampire movies to be traditional exercises in straightforward horror you’ll almost certainly hate this movie. If you prefer the more erotic approach of European directors like Franco and Rollin, and the more romantic vision of Coppola, then you’ll find plenty to like in this one. I loved it.

Wild, Wild Planet (1965)

Wild, Wild Planet is an Italian science fiction film from 1965. The story is about, well actually I have no idea what the story was about. Something to do with futuristic medical technology, orgasm transplants, and miniaturising people. Plus there was a team of female assassins with robots who were kidnapping people. And a mad scientist who wanted to create a race of perfect humans. I think. It has some of the most unconvincing model shots you’ll ever see, but they’re incredibly cute. Director Antonio Margheriti made horror movies as well, and it shows. And have to admit the ending was fairly spectacular, although I have no idea what actually happened. It’s all entertaining enough in a rather high camp way. A great movie if you’re in the mood for this type of thing.

The Cars That Ate Paris (1974)

Back in the days of sail there were many hazards facing mariners. Few were more sinister than the infamous wreckers, who would set false lights to lure unwary ships to their doom, and the plunder their cargoes. Peter Weir’s 1974 movie The Cars That Ate Paris updates this concept. In Australia at an unspecified future date, a time of economic and social collapse, the town of Paris makes its living from car wrecks. The road into the town is treacherous enough, but the townspeople help things along by blinding unlucky drivers with powerful lights. Some motorists survive the wrecks. Some, horribly injured and with brain damage, end their days in the local hospitals as “veggies” while others are adopted into the community. One such motorist is Arthur. He is adopted by the mayor, but he soon discovers that the unconventional economy of Paris has created a dangerously unstable atmosphere in the town. The young people of Paris have created a kind of car cult, and their weirdly customised rebuilt wrecks are the terror of the town. Tensions are rising, and it is only a matter of time before the clash between the generations turns nasty.

I saw this movie years ago. I decided to have another look at it after reading an article on Australian gothic cinema and car cult movies (The Cult Film, Roger Corman and The Cars That Ate Paris by Jonathan Rayner, in Unruly Pleasures, edited by edited by Xavier Mendik and Graeme Harper). This is a truly bizarre little film. Although it was clearly a major inspiration for the later and better known Australian Mad Max movies it has quite a different feel to it. It’s a odd hybrid, a blending of an American B-movie (with both Roger Corman and Russ Meyer appearing to be influences) with a European art film sensibility, and very large dashes of both the surreal and the absurd. It combines all these elements with some fairly biting social and political satire. Weir’s strong visual sense is very evident, the movies looks good, and the acting is good (especially John Meillon as the mayor). Weir was such an original and disturbing director earlier in his career, although there are few signs of this in his later Hollywood work. The Cars That Ate Paris has very little in the way of plot, but it’s a strangely entertaining movie and it’s worth checking out.

Black Magic Rites, AKA The Reincarnation of Isabel (1974)

Renato Polselli’s 1974 film Black Magic Rites (AKA The Reincarnation of Isabel) makes an interesting comparison with Lucio Fulci’s slightly later eurohorror offering The Beyond, which I saw and mentioned here a couple of days ago. The acting in both films is equally bad, the plots are just as incoherent, and both films rely very heavily on gore. There ate two main differences, to my eye. Firstly, the gore in Black Magic Rites has some connection with the story (such as it is) and contributes something to the feel of the movie; the gore in The Beyond is simply thrown in so you won’t notice how boring the movie is. Secondly, Black Magic Rites at least conveys some sense of actual horror, of events that challenge rationality, some sense of real weirdness, and these are elements sadly lacking in Fulci’s movie. That’s not to say that Polselli’s effort is a great movie. It does, however, offer a certain amount of fun, and it has some truly bizarre moments. A sex scene accompanied by dixieland jazz music is not something I’ve encountered in any other movie that I can remember, and after seeing this one it’s easy to see why it’s an idea that hasn’t exactly caught on.

The plot is a fairly stock standard horror movie plot, involving an attempt to bring back to life a woman who was burned in the 14th century as a witch, who was also apparently a vampire. If you’re a fan of very strange eurohorror movies, movies that are very strange even by eurohorror standards, then Black Magic Rites may be just what you’ve been waiting for.