DeepStar Six (1989)

At the tail end of the 80s suddenly everybody was making “terror beneath the sea” science fiction horror movies. Sean S. Cunningham’s 1989 DeepStar Six falls into that category. And it has a slight Alien vibe. 

Cunningham is of course best known as the director of the original Friday the 13th.

None of these movies did particularly well. Even James Cameron’s The Abyss lost a stack of money (due to its $70 million budget). DeepStar Six was made on a much more modest budget of $8 million and lost money.

So what went wrong with DeepStar Six? In my view nothing really went particularly wrong. This is a perfectly decent if not dazzlingy original sci-fi horror B-movie.

The setup is solid enough. The US Navy is building a missile base on the ocean floor. The crew of the undersea habitat DeepStar Six is responsible for the construction and to give the project some respectability and make it appear less sinister there’s a marine biologist with the team (you can’t have an underwater adventure without a marine biologist). The Navy can now claim that this is a scientific research project.

Of course things go wrong. One of the things this movie gets criticised for is that we have a long wait to see the monster. Personally I think that’s one of the movie’s strengths. The monster you don’t see is always scarier than the monster you do see. Until very late in the proceedings the members of the team have absolutely no idea what they’re up against. Is it something natural or man-made? They’re not even sure that it is a creature. If it is then what motivates its actions - is it hunger or a lust for killing or fear?

So the emphasis is on the effects on the crew of an unseen and inexplicable menace. Not knowing the nature of the threat means that they have no clue how to counter it. And they don’t know how much real danger they’re in. The fear builds slowly, which makes it all the more effective.

The pacing is pleasingly brisk. There’s a reasonable amount of action, there’s decent suspense and there is a sense of menace.

The special effects are old school (these were the pre-CGI days) and they look good. The miniatures are excellent. The interiors look good - DeepStar Six looks like a place where people live and work and it looks suitably claustrophobic. Obviously an undersea habitat is not going to be spacious.

The monster is not one of the great movie monsters but it’s OK.

The movie never looks cheap. It looks like some real effort was put into it.

I suspect that the big reason for its box-office failure was the lack of star power. The cast members are all perfectly competent but they’re basically solid character actors. Miguel Ferrer is particularly good.

A second reason might have been the lack of a human villain. There is one character who lets the side down but that’s the result of cracking under extreme psychological pressure rather than evil machinations. I like the fact that these are all people just doing their best but audiences love larger-than-life super-villains.

It might also have benefitted commercially from a bit more sexiness.

This movie isn’t perfect but it’s thoroughly enjoyable. It was treated harshly by critics at the time and still gets unfairly dismissed by online reviewers. It’s a B-movie and it isn’t trying to be profound. You just need to approach it with an open mind. And any movie with submarines and undersea action is inherently cool.

DeepStar Six is highly recommended as a beer and popcorn movie.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray looks lovely and they’ve included three (!!) audio commentaries.

Fantomas vs. Scotland Yard (1967)

Fantomas vs. Scotland Yard, released in 1967, was the last of the three French Fantomas eurospy thrillers directed by André Hunebelle.

The first of a prolific series of novels featuring the arch-criminal Fantômas and written by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre appeared in print in 1911. The first of Louis Feuillade’s Fantomas movie serials was released in 1913.

It was obviously Bond Fever that created the commercial environment in which the 1960s Fantomas movies could be made but they have quite a different feel. They’re crazy and very lighthearted but they’re not the same kinds of spy spoofs as the Matt Helm movies. 

The Fantomas movies are very very French.

Diabolical criminal mastermind Fantomas has surfaced again. His latest scheme is to tax very rich people. If they pay the tax they will be allowed to live. If they don’t pay they will be killed.

Lord Edward MacRashley (Jean-Roger Caussimon) is very rich indeed and he isn’t happy about this. He gets together with his super-rich friends to discuss the matter.

They decide to call in Commissioner Juve (Louis de Funès) from Paris. Juve arrives in Scotland, at Lord MacRashley’s castle. Which is of course haunted.

There’s another quite separate conspiracy being hatched. There are gangsters also. And ghosts, although Commissioner Juve is confident that they’re fake. There’s the obligatory séance scene. All these elements eventually come together very satisfactorily. There’s also a fox hunt but it’s a fake fox, another of Fantomas’s schemes. Nothing is what it seems to be.

We also find out that Fantomas has built a flying car and is now working on a spaceship. There are not as many gadgets as you might expect but the mobile beds are fun. And Fantomas has a video recorder in an attache case.

Juve is accompanied by his assistant Inspector Bertrand (Jacques Dynam), his old friend the reporter Fandor, and Fandor’s girlfriend Hélène Gurn (Mylène Demongeot).

Juve intends to lay a trap for Fantomas but the arch-villain is laying traps of his own.

Fantomas is a master of disguise which plays a key role in the story. This is something that betrays the 1911 origins of the character. Disguise played a huge role in countless Victorian and Edwardian potboilers but was going out of fashion by the 1920s. It is however a nice touch that gives these movies some of their flavour.

The basic plot is not particularly elaborate.

They managed to keep the core cast intact for all three films. I find that a little bit of Louis de Funès goes a long way but this is after all a spy comedy and Juve is a comic character. Jean Marais as usual plays both Fantomas and Fandor, with his customary charisma. Mylène Demongeot is cute and adorable and amusing.

The Château de Roquetaillade stands in for Lord MacRashley’s castle. It doesn’t look all that Scottish but it does look nice.

There are some action scenes but they’re played for zaniness rather than thrills.

As with any spy spoof you need to have a high tolerance for silliness.

Fantomas vs. Scotland Yard is good-natured fun. Recommended.

Kino Lorber have released all three Fantomas movies in a boxed set, available on both DVD and Blu-Ray.

I’ve also reviewed the first two movies, Fantomas (1964) and Fantomas Unleashed (1965). And I’ve reviewed the 1913 movie serial Juve contre Fantômas (1913) and the first of the novels, Allain and Souvestre’s Fantômas.

Hollywood 90028 (1973)

Hollywood 90028 was written, directed and produced by Christina Hornisher. She seems to have worked on it intermittently in 1969 and 1970 but it was not released until 1973.  It then more or less vanished into obscurity. 

This was Christina Hornisher’s only feature film and when you’ve watched Hollywood 90028 you understand why she never got to make another movie. It has huge huge problems.

Superficially it’s a serial killer thriller but it isn’t really a thriller. It isn’t really an exploitation movie. It tries very very hard to be an art movie, with decidedly mixed results.

Mark (Christopher Augustine) is an aspiring filmmaker who pays the bills by making adult films. He is confident that it’s just a matter of time until he is recognised as the next Kubrick.

In the opening scene we see him pick up a girl, they go to bed and he strangles her.

Then we’re into his struggles as an artist forced to degrade himself by making nudie movies. On an S&M-themed shoot he meets Michelle. He falls for her big time.

The relationship between Mark and Michelle seems to progress to a certain point and then go no further. Which is not surprising. She has a rich successful boyfriend who keeps her in luxury and while she likes Mark she is realistic enough to realise that dumping the rich boyfriend for a failed filmmaker loser like Mark would be foolish.

While he tries to work out his relationship with Michelle he still finds time to strangle another girl.

Eventually, with agonising slowness, we get to the climax and it’s truly memorable (and easily the best part of the movie) although Hornisher then undercuts it with some heavy-handed symbolism.

Christina Hornisher’s art film ambitions are very obvious. She makes sure that it doesn’t come across as an exploitation movie by making the murder scenes flat and uninteresting and making the sex scenes totally un-erotic.

I’m not sure what Hornisher was trying to say because she keeps undercutting herself. Is she saying that making naughty movies has made Mark crazy, or that Hollywood has made him crazy? Maybe, but in that case why go to so much trouble to let us know that Mark has been messed up since childhood? Is she saying that adult films exploit women? Maybe, but the other girl in the main adult movie scene is laughing and joking while the camera is rolling. She’s having fun. And there is not the slightest indication that Michelle is    affected in any way by doing that scene. Immediately afterwards she’s her usual bright and breezy self. There’s nothing remotely messed up about Michelle. She has a rich sugar daddy who treats her extremely well. She likes her luxury home. She’s a winner. These girls do not seem exploited.

Is Hornisher saying that capitalism is the problem? But that doesn’t work, since we know that Mark’s problems go back to his childhood. And Michelle lives in luxury. Capitalism hasn’t done her any harm.

This movie mostly comes across as a student film that needed a lot more work. And a lot more focus. The script (which Hornisher wrote under a pseudonym) just isn’t properly thought out.

It’s difficult to imagine what her target audience was. The exploitation elements would have alienated the art house audience. It’s way too tame for the grindhouse market. And it’s way too slow and plodding for drive-in audiences. It was in fact released on the drive-in circuit and it’s not surprising that it sank without trace.

The wonderful 1969-70 location shooting in L.A. is the best thing about this movie. It’s a nice time capsule.

Despite the effective shock ending Hollywood 90028 just doesn’t come off. It isn’t even an interesting failure or a fascinating oddity. I honestly cannot recommend this one.

Grindhouse Releasing went crazy with this one, releasing it as a three-disc (!) Blu-Ray set with two cuts of the movie, two audio commentaries, Hornisher’s early experimental shorts and assorted documentaries and interviews plus the soundtrack on CD.

The Demon of Mount Oe (1960)

The Demon of Mount Oe, directed by Tokuzô Tanaka, is a 1960 movie from Japan’s Daiei Studio. It’s been included in a gothic horror Blu-Ray boxed set from Radiance Films but it does not fit at all neatly into the gothic horror genre. Of course Japanese gothic horror is rather different from European gothic horror but this is not even typical Japanese gothic horror.

It’s based on a folk tale dating back at least to the 14th century. The director and the writers of the film have made sweeping changes to the story, presumably to a large degree to make it more appealing as a commercial feature film.

The movie begins with the cruel ruthless kampaku (a high court official) deciding to rid himself of his concubine, the Lady Nagisa. Not because she no longer appeals to him but because she is cursed. We will later discover that she was cursed by her husband who felt that having been dishonoured she had dishonoured herself further by not choosing death. The kampaku sends her to the chief of the Genji clan. He already has a concubine, Kotsuma, who is now worried that the Lady Nagisa, with her exquisite court manners, will outshine her.

The district is being terrorised by shape-changing demons and bandits. The demon lord Shuten-Doji (Kazuo Hasegawa) shares his impregnable mountain lair with the female demon Ibaragi.

The Genji general Raikô has the task of destroying this nest of bandits and demons. He will need Kotsuma’s help because there is a legend that only a woman can bring about the destruction of the demon lord.

Raikô has already had an encounter with Ibaragi during which he cut her arm off. She is very very annoyed about this.

There will be be epic battles between Raikô’s soldiers and the bandit army and several nasty battles against demons who have assumed monstrous forms (such as a gigantic spider).

So there certainly are unequivocally supernatural forces at work.

But there’s more than that going on. There are power struggles. There are several intersecting love stories. There is love betrayed, but it turns out to be less simple than that. 

There are questions of honour and some of the characters will find that their attempts to behave honourably have had unfortunate consequences.

What seemed likely to be a straightforward good vs evil story gradually becomes much more complex with lots of shades of grey. Good characters do not necessarily always behave well and wicked characters are not necessarily as purely wicked as we thought.

This is a movie that makes no concessions to realism. This is a world from folklore, a fantasy world. It does not matter if the special effects are realistic because nothing in this film is supposed to look realistic. What does matter is that the special effects do look cool.

The visuals achieve just the right feel, as if we have stepped into another world.

This is like a fairy tale but with psychologically complex characters so the actors need to demonstrate some subtlety whilst still seeming like figures out of legend. They all do a fine job with Kazuo Hasegawa being especially impressive.

The Demon of Mount Oe is very ambitious. It tries to be more than just a supernatural tale and it succeeds pretty well. It’s unconventional approach makes it highly recommended

The Radiance Films Blu-Ray transfer looks lovely. There are three movies in this set. The accompanying booklet includes a brief moderately interesting essay on The Demon of Mount Oe but this is a movie that really needed an audio commentary. A bit of background on the historical background and on the Japanese concept of demons (very very different from the western concept) would I am sure have been welcomed by most viewers.

Curse of the Cat People (1944)

The Curse of the Cat People, released in 1944, was the sixth of the horror films produced by Val Lewton for RKO. 

This was Robert Wise’s first movie as director. 

As with Cat People DeWitt Bodeen got the writing credit but in fact the script was co-written by Bodeen and Lewton.

RKO gave Lewton enormous creative freedom except for one thing - they got to assign the titles to the movies before the scripts had even been begun. Oddly enough this worked quite well - being given a title and then having to build a movie around it was a challenge to which Lewton was more than equal. 

But in this particular case Lewton really was dismayed. He did not want to make any sequels. He solved this problem very adroitly. The Curse of the Cat People is an object lesson in how to make a sequel without actually quite making a sequel. They are two separate but linked movies.

While it’s not quite a sequel The Curse of the Cat People does reveal major spoilers for Cat People. You absolutely must see Cat People first. And the nature of the story means that it is impossible to discuss The Curse of the Cat People without revealing huge spoilers for Cat People. So from this point on this review will contain very big spoilers for Cat People.

The time element is a slight problem. Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) and Alice Moore (Jane Randolph) are now married and they have a six-year-old daughter, Amy (Ann Carter). This means that at least seven years must have elapsed since the events of the first movie.

Oliver has never fully recovered from the death of Irena. He deals with it by convincing himself that Irena simply had strange fantasies but Cat People is unequivocally and unambiguously a supernatural horror story. There is no doubt that the supernatural was involved.

Amy is a sweet kid but inclined to live in a dream world. She is solitary rather than lonely. The other children avoid her but this possibly bothers her father even more than it bothers her.

An eccentric old lady gives Amy a ring. It’s a wishing ring. The one thing Amy wishes for is a friend. The old lady has a daughter but refuses to admit it. She insists that her daughter died years earlier and that this woman is an imposter.

Oliver has an odd obsession that Amy is going to take after Irena. Which is of course impossible. She’s Alice’s child, not Irena’s. Although Oliver stubbornly refuses to admit that anything supernatural happened in the past involving Irena he does seem to fear that Irena might somehow be able to exert an influence on Amy. It’s a kind of irrational superstitious fear.

Oliver is not only worried about Amy’s tendency to live in a dream world. It frightens and angers him.

And Amy’s dream world takes a sudden turn when she finds the friend she so desperately wants. The lady is Irena, or Irena’s ghost.

There are many who insist that nothing at all supernatural happens in this movie. It can certainly be interpreted that way. Whether having viewed the movie you believe that Irena’s ghost is real or not is up to you.

With Nic Musuraca once again doing the cinematography this is a visually gorgeous movie with a very slight fairy tale flavour.

Lewton may not have liked the title but it did allow Simone Simon to be cast. After the huge success of Cat People Simone Simon was definitely regarded as bankable and she was the movie’s main selling point, getting top billing and being prominently featured on the poster. To be honest this is such a low-key movie that the title and the presence of Simone Simon were desperately needed to give it any chance at all of commercial success.

Ann Carter pretty much has to carry the whole movie and her superb performance is its biggest strength. Jane Randolph is dull. Kent Smith is dull as well and in this movie Oliver is a very unpleasant unsympathetic character.

Incidentally once the film was completed Lewton decided he was dissatisfied with the ending and ordered reshoots with a slightly different ending.

This is not even remotely a horror movie. It’s almost a fairy tale movie. It’s the story of an unhappy little girl and it was very autobiographical. There are bits of Lewton in Amy and in Oliver and other characters are based partially on people from Lewton’s past. It’s interesting but to me it seems too low-key for its own good and it’s not surprising that it’s commercial performance was disappointing. It’s worth a look as an interesting misfire although I should point out that most people like it a lot more than I did.

Robert Wise did go on to make a genuinely great horror movie, The Haunting (1963).

Legend (1985)

Legend is a 1985 fantasy film directed by Ridley Scott and it seems to be almost a forgotten movie. 

This is old school fantasy, not just in terms of special effects but in terms of overall feel. It has more of an affinity with movies like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth than with more recent fantasy films.

This is a fairy tale movie without any noticeable comic-book influence.

It was a box-office flop and critics were unimpressed.

The central characters are Princess Lili (Mia Sara) and Jack (Tom Cruise). This is definitely the Realm of Faerie, a world of magic with goblins and unicorns and all manner of fantastic creatures, but it appears that Lili and Jack are human. Jack lives in the forest. Perhaps he was raised by the fairies? He does speak the language of the animals. 

Lili and Jack are madly in love and although Jack does not seem to have the usual qualifications one needs in order to marry a princess it is clear that Lili has chosen him.

These two young lovebirds then make two serious mistakes. They do two forbidden things. Firstly Jack allows Lili to touch a unicorn, something no mortal is permitted to do. And then Lili exercises her prerogative as a princess to set Jack a quest. She tosses the ring that signifies their betrothal into the lake. Jack must retrieve it, which proves impossible.

Unfortunately these mistakes aid the magical plans of the Lords of Darkness. He detests the sunshine and plans to create a world of perpetual night. To achieve this he must destroy the forest’s two unicorns and he must corrupt innocence. And Lili is clearly an innocent.

The corruption of Lili began with her impetuous urge to touch the unicorn.

The forest has now been plunged into permanent winter.

Jack is not exactly obvious hero material. He’s a naïve good-natured child of the forest. But now he will have to become a hero. 

Yes, there’s a hero’s journey here and Jack has a Destiny.

He has a small band of fairies to help him. They don’t seem like much of an army but they are devoted to Lili. And the elf Gump will be a useful lieutenant.

Tom Cruise is surprisingly effective as a sweet-natured hapless lad trying desperately hard to do the hero thing. And he’s very likeable. He’s the one cast member who gets it just right.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Tim Curry is incredibly hammy as the Lord of Darkness.

Lili is the problem. But that depends on which ending you choose. Yes, this is a Ridley Scott movie so there are three different cuts of the movie each with a radically different ending which changes the whole movie, and which will totally change your feelings about Lili. Either way the fact remains that Mia Sara just didn’t have the necessary star quality or warmth or depth to make us really care about Lili.

This was 1985, long before CGI. But by this time old school special effects and makeup effects had become extraordinarily sophisticated and effective. Legend is a demonstration of just how stunning pre-CGI movies could be.

Ridley Scott’s greatest asset has always been his aesthetic vision and his ability to assemble teams of talented people who can put his vision on the screen. His best movies are largely exercises in aesthetic vision and when he sticks to that he makes superb movies. When he makes movies that require storytelling skill and complex characterisation  the results can be very disappointing (Someone To Watch Over Me being a prime example). I think each of the endings of Legend has its pluses and minuses.

Legend has a few problems but they’re outweighed by its strengths. Recommended.

Frankenhooker (1990)

Frankenhooker, directed and co-written by Frank Henenlotter, sure is one crazyass movie. It’s very gory but it’s so silly that the gore isn’t really disturbing. It’s goofy and bizarre and it’s funny. And it came out in 1990 so it has that distinctive late 80/early 90s vibe.

This is the infamous exploding hookers movie.

Jeffrey Franken is a young man living in New Jersey with his mom. He’s engaged to a sweet girl, Elizabeth. Jeffrey is a failed med student who works for the power company and likes to tinker with gadgets. Gadgets such as a remote-controlled lawnmower which runs amok and slices Elizabeth into little pieces.

Most guys would go through a period of grieving after something like this. But not Jeffrey. He thinks he can fix her. OK, all he has to work with is her head but it’s a start.

He has his own mad scientist laboratory, which looks great because it looks exactly like the kind of mad scientist laboratory that a guy would build in his garage.

He’s going to need some female body parts. 

And he has a brainwave. Working girls. Hookers. They sell their whole bodies. Or rather they rent them out. If he could get hold of some hookers so that he would have a choice of body parts he could not only give Elizabeth a new body, it could be a perfect body. The best legs. The nicest hands. The best posterior. And the best breasts.

Jeffrey will need to be at his best to carry out some very advanced surgical techniques but he has found a way to enhance his intellectual skills, by means of drilling holes in his own skull.

To convince the hookers to co-operate he manufactures a large quantity of super-crack. This stuff is dynamite. Literally.

The hooker idea doesn’t work and then again it does work. He didn’t think there’d be such a mess but then he’s never seen girls explode before. But at least now he has lots of body parts.

Now we get a major homage to the 1931 Frankenstein movie with the roof of the garage opening so that the electricity necessary to provide the vital spark of life can be provided by lightning.

There’s another homage to the 1931 movie, with a twist. In that movie things went wrong when the monster had a criminal’s brain implanted by mistake. In this case Jeffrey finds out that if you construct the perfect woman from hookers you’ll end up with a super-hooker. A Frankenhooker!

It’s a sleazy movie in very poor taste (with plenty of T&A) and it doesn’t care and if you can be offended by a movie as goofy as this you should seek professional help. And if you’re looking for ideological underpinnings here then it’s too late for professional help to do any good.

It’s also, in its own way, a sincere tribute to the great horror movie tradition. Henenlotter assumes you’ve seen and loved the 1931 movie and if you haven’t then you’ll miss many of Frankenhooker’s cleverest moments.

And it’s a love story. OK, a deranged love story, but you have to admire Jeffrey’s devotion. His girlfriend has been reduced to hamburger meat but that doesn’t stop him from loving her.

Given the movie’s tone there was no reason to agonise over getting the special effects to look realistic. Realistic special effects would have made this movie unpleasant instead of fun. And making even the slightest attempt to make the science stuff make sense would have spoilt things. Frankenhooker glories in its silliness.

I like James Lorinz as Jeffrey. He doesn’t go overboard but he has a wonderful intense crazed look. Patty Mullen is fun as both Elizabeth and Frankenhooker.

Frankenhooker is totally nuts and and absurdly outrageous and I enjoyed it a lot. Highly recommended.

I have the French Blu-Ray which looks great.