Black Sabbath (1963)

Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, made in 1963, is an omnibus film comprising three segments. The first segment, The Telephone, is interesting as a precursor of later giallo films but it really didn’t do anything for me. In the second segment Bava abandons contemporary settings and goes for full-on gothic horror. The Wurdulak (which features Boris Karloff) is a routine vampire story, or at least it would be in anyone else’s hands. In Bava’s hands it’s a gorgeous visual feast. Movies don’t get any more gothic than this. Bava achieves things with colour and lighting that are both strange and exquisite. I don’t think anyone has done better night photography. It’s so good that you expect the third segment to be a bit of an anti-climax but if anything it’s even better visually. The story is again a straightforward story of ghostly punishments for robbing the dead. It concerns a nurse called out one night to prepare a dead countess for her funeral. The nurse spots a valuable ring on the dead woman’s finger and you can guess the rest. What makes it extraordinary is that Bava doesn’t just tell the story through visual images, he tells the story almost entirely with lighting and colour. A stormy night with lightning is the oldest cliché in horror but Bava does it better than it’s ever been done. The pulsating light seen through a single window conveys an atmosphere not just of fear but of something truly uncanny.

I don’t think it’s Bava’s best film (for me his masterpiece is his 1973 movie Lisa and the Devil) but it’s definitely essential viewing.

Modesty Blaise (1966)

Modesty Blaise is a movie that most people don’t seem to have a good word for. Be that as it may, I absolutely adored it. This 1966 film, somewhat surprisingly directed by Joseph Losey, is based on the popular comic strip character (at least popular at the time, I have no idea if the comic strip is still remembered). It’s one of those vaguely psychedelic 60s spy spoofs. At the time there was a rash of movies satirising the James Bond spy caper genre. The problem with trying to send up the Bond movies (I mean the real Bond movies, the ones made in the 60s) is that you can’t because they’re already doing that themselves; they’re so tongue-in-cheek already that any attempt at satire inevitably falls flat. To succeed, such a movie has to offer more than the standard spy spoof ingredients of outlandish plots and silly gadgets. Modesty Blaise offers quite a bit more. It offers stupendous visual style, a trippy and outrageously colourful Pop art/comic book concoction that succeeds by virtue of its own excess. It’s the Ken Russell approach – if you’re afraid you may have gone too far over the top, go a bit further. It also offers wonderful larger-than-life acting performances that scale the highest heights of High Camp. Dirk Bogarde is Gabriel, the diabolical criminal mastermind of the piece, but he’s a diabolical criminal mastermind who dislikes having to hurt people. Of course being a diabolical criminal mastermind he has to hurt people sometimes (it’s rather expected of one) but he always feels their pain. It’s Bogarde’s most extravagant comic performance, and he’s a delight. Terence Stamp is quite bizarre as Modesty’s partner in crime Willie Garvin, a kind of working-class international playboy type, like a slum kid who’s suddenly made it rich through football or crime but remains a loveable ragamuffin at heart. He should be an extremely annoying character but Stamp gets away with it through sheer nerve. Monica Vitti is weird and exotic in the title role, playing it all with insane amounts of glamour and managing to be both very sexy and oddly innocent. She and Terence Stamp periodically break into song, which adds a whole extra layer of surrealism to the proceedings. Harry Andrews and Michael Craig provide solid support, their performances in keeping with the bizarreness of the rest of the film. Rossella Falk is Gabriel’s psychopathic killer henchwoman Mrs Fothergill and steals every scene she’s in.

Most of the criticism of the movie is accurate, but misses the point. Losey was a strange choice to direct such a film, but his slightly European art-film sensibility works the movie’s advantage, giving it a rather avant-garde kind of feel. Combining that with a comic strip spy spoof is something that could only have worked in the 1960s, but it does work. Losey also has a keen sense of the absurd, and the movie’s existential absurdism is another ingredient in its success. I think it’s probably fair to say that you have to love the 1960s in order to appreciate this movie, and you probably need a certain familiarity with the 60s as well. If you’re expecting a straightforward comic romp you may be disappointed - Modesty Blaise is actually closer in feel to Antonioni’s Blow-Up or Godard’s Band of Outsiders than it is to Carry on Spying or the Austin Powers movies. It’s a strange brew, but I found it delightfully intoxicating.

Island of Terror (1966)

Island of Terror (made by Planet Productions in 1966) is one of those horror films that motors along quite well, with a premise that is silly certainly, but ingenious, creepy and quite scary, until about its halfway point. At that point the monster must be revealed, and as so often happens the monster just doesn’t cut it, and the movie never quite recovers. But it is a Terence Fisher movie, and Terence Fisher is never less than competent and you know he’ll keep the action moving along at a great pace. In some ways, though, Terence Fisher is the problem – he was probably just too good a director for this movie. I’ve always thought that the more seriously Fisher took himself the better he was. In movies like Dracula, Prince of Darkness and The Devil Rides Out that seriousness gives us genuinely chilling movies that make us feel that This Is Not a Game – there are more serious things even than life and death at stake here, and there are serious moral issues to confront as well. Island of Terror just doesn’t lend itself to such serious treatment. This tale of medical experiments gone wrong on a remote island off the cost of Ireland is at times strongly reminiscent of The Day of the Triffids. Peter Cushing gives a solid but slightly subdued performance as a doctor battling the effects of the experiments, while the rest of the cast is quite adequate. It’s not by any means a terrible film, and Fisher does provide us with some real chills. If you like 1960s British sci-fi/horror this one’s fairly entertaining. Just don’t expect something in the same league as Terence Fisher’s Hammer movies.

The Girl from Rio (1969)

During the 1960s quite a few European movie-makers tried to capture the spirit of comic books on film, with varying degrees of success. The best of these attempts were Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik! and Corrado Farina’s Baba Yaga. Roger Vadim’s Barbarella is better known, but less successful. Several of Jess Franco’s late 60s movies also fall into this category. The Girl from Rio is not actually based on a comic, but on a series of delightfully pulpy potboilers by Sax Rohmer, but he’s clearly trying to get that comic book vibe (and in fact admits as much in the accompanying interview).

Jeff Sutton is in Rio, having just stolen $10 million, but he’s having trouble hanging on to his loot. Crime lord Masius (George Sanders) wants to take it off him, and so does Sumuru, the beautiful but evil ruler of the all-female city of Femina. Sumuru finances her private queendom through a large-scale kidnapping racket, with most of her victims being shady businessmen, corrupt officials or out-and-out crooks. It soon turns out that Sutton is not what he seems to be. Franco had a minuscule budget to work with but achieves a futuristic sci-fi look in the same way that Jean-Luc Godard did in Alphaville, by using the stark brutalist buildings of modernist architecture as his settings. While Godard combined these with black-and-and-white cinematography to create an atmosphere of alienation, Franco uses glorious colours, bright sunshine and psychedelic costumes to create a campy 60s Pop Art world. To criticise this movie, as some have done, for its lack of realistic action sequences is to miss the point of the entirely. The fact that Sumuru’s amazonian warriors are simply waving their guns about because the budget didn’t extend even as far as blank ammunition simply adds another level of stylisation to the film and enhances the comic book ambience. Franco is a master of the art of making a virtue of a necessity, and a non-existent budget was for him merely a very minor obstacle. The fact that it’s also a movie that spoofs spy 60s spy films and therefore requires some high-tech gadgetry, but there was no budget for even low-tech gadgetry, is another obstacle that Uncle Jess takes in his stride. The death ray machines in this movie emit invisible death rays, so the fact that the gadgets don’t actually do anything simply doesn’t matter! Despite its lack of high-tech and special effects The Girl from Rio works as a spy spoof in a way that much more expensive Hollywood attempts at the same genre (like the Matt Helm movies) fail, because Franco’s love of trash culture is genuine. He’s not a would-be mainstream film-maker slumming it making movies like this, and he understands the pop aesthetics of this type of movie to perfection. Approached in the right way The Girl from Rio is a great deal of fun. Shirley Eaton makes a splendid glamorous diabolical criminal mastermind, and George Sanders camps it up outrageously as the gangster Masius. I loved this movie. And the Blue Underground DVD release is, as you’d expect from that company, absolutely superb.

Mudhoney (1964)

If you’re only familiar with Russ Meyer from movies like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls or Supervixens then his 1965 movie Mudhoney is going to come as quite a surprise. It has the sudden eruptions of violence that also feature in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! but it’s much darker, and much grimmer. Yes, it has huge-breasted women, and some nudity, and some of the characteristic and rather black and bizarre Russ Meyer humour, but mostly it’s an unrelentingly serious and very disturbing movie. Set in a small town during the Depression, it tells the story of an ex-convict called Calif who takes a job as a farm hand. His employer is a woman named Hannah, who lives on the farm with her kindly father and her violent alcoholic husband. The husband spends most of his time at the local whorehouse. He’s just waiting for dear old dad to die so he can sell the farm from under his wife and take off with the money. When Calif falls in love with Hannah a train of violence and madness is set in motion, partially fuelled by an hysterical and almost certainly insane preacher who has decided that both Hannah and Calif are adulterous spawn of Satan.

This is one of the most savage and uncompromisingly negative portrayals of American small town life in movie history. It has the lot – small-minded townsfolk, a bigoted preacher, mindless violence, drunkenness, lynchings, rape, mob violence and more inbred rednecks than you’ve ever seen in one movie. As usual in a Russ Meyer movie, the most sympathetic characters are the women – there’s Clara Belle, a good-natured and fun-loving whore; her mute sister Eula, also a whore; and Hannah herself, a typical strong and very sexual Meter woman. Apart from Calif, the men are mostly violent or ineffectual or both. Or, in the case of the preacher, crazed as well. To me the movie seems like a classic example of American gothic at its best. Meyer’s satire is rarely subtle, but it’s undeniably effective. Hal Hopper is superb as the drunken husband. It’s a savage little movie that still packs a punch, and I highly recommend it.

And Soon the Darkness (1970)

And Soon the Darkness is a well-crafted and very tense British horror thriller. Director Robert Fuest is probably best-known for the two Dr Phibes movies with Vincent Price, while co-writer Brian Clemens was responsible for countless fine British TV and movie scripts. Two English nurses, Cathy and Jane, are on a cycling holiday in France. They quarrel, and Jane rides off leaving Cathy behind. When she goes back to find her friend, she has disappeared, and Jane notices that a young man who was following them earlier is now following her. She becomes really worried when she reaches a nearby village, and hears people talking about a murder. With her rudimentary command of French she can’t be entirely sure what they’re saying, but it’s enough to alarm her, and she has great difficulty locating the local gendarme, which alarms her still further. This movie is a great example of the principle that you don’t need big stars and huge budgets to make entertaining movies, and you don’t need buckets of gore to make a terrifying movie. And Soon the Darkness relies entirely on atmosphere and on suspense, and it works superbly. Jane’s sense of helplessness and isolation, alone in a foreign country and unable to make herself understood clearly (this is emphasised by having all the supporting characters speaking French without any sub-titles, so the viewer feels Jane’s frustration at her inability to communicate effectively) is almost unbearable. There’s nothing fancy about this movie, and there’s nothing startling about the plot. It’s simply done very very well. A highly effective little horror thriller.

Girl Boss Guerilla (1972)

As the opening credits of Girl Boss Guerilla (Sukeban gerira) roll the members of the Shinjuku Red Helmets, a girl biker gang from Tokyo, ride into Kyoto. Their leader, Sachiko (Miki Sugimoto) intends to establish herself as the new girl boss of Kyoto. She achieves this by challenging her rival to single combat, and defeating her in a remarkably brutal fight sequence. She also encounters Nami (Reiko Ike), who had been girl boss of Kyoto until she retired to become a sort of freelance juvenile delinquent. They also fight, and after beating each other to a pulp become firm friends. These girls have a fairly rugged concept of female bonding. Nami’s brother is a mid-ranking goon with the local yakuza, and he and Nami don’t get on, to say the least. As the Red Helmets start to dabble in more ambitious Criminal activities they find themselves increasingly in conflict with the local yakuza boss, especially after Sachiko’s boxer boyfriend beats up several of the yakuza gang members. The stage is set for a vicious showdown between the yakuza and the biker girls.

The first half of Girl Boss Guerilla, one of the more celebrated of the Japanese “pinky violence” movies of the 70s, is a mix of action, violence, sex and extraordinarily crude humour. It also has a truly bizarre quality to it. To give a sense of the flavour of this movie, at one point one of the Red Helmets has her motorcycle stolen by a bald Buddhist nun. When the nun falls off the stolen bike and injures her leg, the girls take her to a local gynaecologist. He turns out not to be a real gynaecologist, so the girls take the opportunity to indulge in a spot of blackmail, at which point the nun decides that she what she really wants is to become a girl biker. Director Norifumi Suzuki’s hostility to organised religion is awe-inspiring, and both Catholics and Buddhists find themselves in the firing line. The feel of the movie is a little like a Russ Meyer movie, with a dash of John Waters. The second half of the movie is much darker and more violent, in fact outrageously violent. This was my first exposure to the “pinky violence” genre, although I have a couple of other titles I haven’t watched yet. An odd little movie, but entertaining.