The Police are Blundering in the Dark (1974)

The Police are Blundering in the Dark is a 1974 Italian feature written and directed by Helia Colombo and it appears to be his only film credit. It’s easy to see why. This movie could have been called The Director is Blundering in the Dark. Despite its flaws it is morbidly fascinating and it has some definite oddball features that make it worth a look.

Incidentally the IMDb claims that Helia Colombo was a woman which is totally incorrect. Almost everything in this movie’s IMDb listing appears to be wrong.

We start with a woman getting a flat tyre on a lonely country road. She then gets butchered by an unknown assailant.

There’s a young couple, Lucia and Alberto, who have just been engaged as servants at a villa owned by a wealthy artist named Parrisi. Lucia and Alberto have an uneasy relationship. And the atmosphere at the villa is unsettling. Parrisi is confined to a wheelchair. His wife Eleonora (Halina Zalewska) is obviously sexually frustrated. Fortunately she is able to satisfy her sexual urges with their niece Sara. There’s also Dr Dalla, who spends a great deal of time at the villa when he’s not tending his gardens.

Another young woman, Enrichetta Blonde (a fine name for a character in a giallo), also has car trouble. She finds a roadside inn and rings her sleazy journalist boyfriend Giorgio (Joseph Arkim). He can’t come to pick her up because he’s busy in bed with another woman. By the time he arrives next morning it’s too late for poor Enrichetta Blonde.

At this stage Enrichetta’s body has not been found so Giorgio thinks she’s just gone missing. An entry in her diary leads him to Parrisi’s villa where he becomes a house guest. And finds himself in the middle of all kinds of weird psycho-sexual dramas. Giorgio is not a man to let opportunities slip by so he figures he might as well seduce both the housemaid and the niece.

As the movie progresses it becomes more incoherent but also much weirder. There is even a possible science fiction element.

Obviously there’s a psycho killer loose but there’s no point in suspecting characters who seem possibly crazy or sexually twisted because every character in this movie seems to be at least somewhat crazy and sexually twisted.

There’s the halfwit son of the old couple who run the inn. There’s Parrisi, whose artistic interests focus on the female nude. He’s eccentric and probably sexually dysfunctional. There’s his wife who is bedding his niece. Eleonora is also a diagnosed erotomaniac. The two servants, Lucia and Alberto, are shifty and seem at least slightly depraved. Lucia is a nymphomaniac so no man is safe with her around. The doctor is obsessed with flowers and is a bit of a worry. And Giorgio himself is an inveterate and amoral womaniser.

And did I mention the guy who has found a way to photograph people’s thoughts?

Colombo attempts a couple of spectacular murder set-pieces, with mixed success. Overall the violence level is fairly moderate. There is no shortage of bare breasts.

The movie has a very low-budget and slightly amateurish feel. Colombo’s inexperience as writer and director is painfully evident. At times this is an asset - he makes odd unexpected choices. Sometimes the choices are misguided but sometimes they’re weirdly interesting. The script is very slapdash. It has some very good ideas but their potential is not fully exploited. Most of the cast and crew, with a few exceptions, were also very inexperienced.

One thing this film has in its favour is a claustrophobic hothouse atmosphere of sleaze, kinkiness and sexual dysfunction.

The science fiction element (the thought photography machine) isn’t just thrown in to add a bit more strangeness. It plays a pivotal part in the plot.

Parrisi, the wildly eccentric artist, is the one character who really makes an impression.

This movie was shot in 1972 but not released until 1975. It made little impression at the box office.

The Police are Blundering in the Dark has to be considered a failure but at least it fails in interesting ways. Despite its flaws I found myself enjoying it. Tentatively recommended.

It’s included in Vinegar Syndrome’s Forgotten Gialli volume1 Blu-Ray boxed set, along with Trauma and Javier Aguirre’s disappointing The Killer Is One of Thirteen. The Police are Blundering in the Dark gets a reasonably decent transfer (to be fair it’s a movie that probably never looked all that great). The only extra is a short but informative audio essay by Rachel Nisbet.

Genocide (1968)

In the late 1960s Japan’s Shochiku studio made a short-lived and rather tentative attempt to break into the booming market for science fiction, horror and monster movies. Four of these movies are included in Criterion’s Eclipse Series 37 DVD boxed set When Horror Came to Shochiku. While it’s a cool name for a boxed set it’s a tad misleading since these movies are certainly not typical late 60s horror films. They all combine horror and science fiction in weird and wonderful ways.

Genocide begins with a swarm of insects causing an American B-52 bomber to crash into the sea near Kojima Island, just off the coast of Japan. The three crew members survive and reach the island. The B-52 was carrying a H-bomb.

The crash was witnessed by Joji (Yûsuke Kawazu), a young Japanese guy who collects insects for a scientist. At least his gorgeous young wife Yukari (Emi Shindô) thinks he’s collecting insects. Actually he’s canoodling with a blonde named Annabelle (Kathy Horan).

The Americans really want to find their H-bomb. They do find the three crew members but two are dead and the third, Charly, has lost his memory (we later find out he’s lost his mind as well).

Joji is now under suspicion of murder. Yukari knows about the blonde and she’s not happy about it but she still loves Joji. She appeals to Dr Nagumo (Keisuke Sonoi) for help. Nagumo is the scientist for whom Joji collects bugs. Nagumo is keen to help.

So far it all makes sense, doesn’t it? Well it won’t make sense for long. Dr Nagumo is already disturbed by reports from around the globe of strange insect behaviour.

Dr Nagumo is more worried after he’s visited the cave in which the American airmen took shelter. He’s also worried about Charly’s condition. Charly has been seriously spooked by something. He is now terrified of bugs.

The bugs are definitely behaving oddly but there are humans on the island who are up to mysterious and possibly wicked things as well. At this stage we have no idea what they might be up to or which of the people on the island might be involved.

There are quite a few people acting strangely. There’s the creepy guy at the hotel. Maybe he just wants to get into Yukari’s pants but maybe he has another agenda as well. We know that Joji has been covering up his torrid love affair with Annabelle. He could be covering up other things. Dr Nagumo seems like a nice guy but we can’t discount the possibility he might turn out to be a mad scientist. We’re a bit suspicious of Annabelle. And the Americans get rather evasive when they’re asked about that H-bomb.

Up to this point the movie’s craziness level is in low gear but it will soon be kicked into overdrive. The motivations of the various characters are totally nuts. The nature of the mysterious happenings on the island turns out to be bizarre.

And then we get a full-blown psychedelic freak-out sequence.

The acting isn’t very good but it’s appropriate to the demented subject matter and I rather enjoyed Kathy Horan doing the dangerous blonde thing as Annabelle.

The special effects (and especially the miniatures work) are definitely iffy. That doesn’t matter in such an insane movie. It just adds to the fun. And some of the effects with the insects do work.

The plot is gloriously silly but you have to admire its boldness. Who says movies have to make sense?

Genocide is a wild crazy ride. The pacing is excellent. The craziness doesn’t let up. Thankfully there’s no comic relief. There’s an anti-war message but it doesn’t become tedious. There’s delightfully off-the-wall pseudo-science. It combines horror, science fiction and spy film elements. Genocide is just pure enjoyment. Highly recommended if you love insane psychotronic movies.

The DVD transfer is very good. So far I’ve watched three of the movies in the boxed set. The X from Outer Space (1967) and The Living Skeleton (1968) are both goofy fun while Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968) is delightfully deranged.

Almost Human (1974)

Almost Human (Milano odia: la polizia non può sparare) is a 1974 poliziottesco directed by Umberto Lenzi. This is the first of half a dozen poliziotteschi Lenzi made with star Tomas Milian. Confusingly it has been released with numerous different titles.

Milian is Giulio Sacchi, a particularly dumb hoodlum. After he almost causes a bank robbery to go wrong Giulio gets beaten up by his accomplices. He decides to strike out on his own. He’s ambitious. He’s going to pull a really really big job. He’s going to kidnap Marilù Porrino (Laura Belli), the daughter of a fabulously rich industrialist.

Giulio is ambitious but he’s too dumb and too crazy to figure out that he’s unlikely to get away with it. Especially with accomplices like Vittorio (Gino Santercole) and Carmine (Ray Lovelock). Vittorio is just dumb but Carmine is an obvious weak link - he’s young, emotional and highly strung. Once the killings start he’s not going to cope very well.

And the killings start immediately. Giulio does not intend to leave a single witness alive. Anyone who knows anything at all, no matter how insignificant, is going to be killed. Giulio has obtained three submachine-guns. They are going to get a lot of use.

Commissario Walter Grandi (Henry Silva) is a no-nonsense cop who knows his job. Giulio has left a few minor loose ends and Grandi is slowly putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

This is certainly a violent movie. The violence is graphic and it’s doubly shocking in its remorselessness. You know that anybody who crosses Giulio’s path is going to die in a hail of machine-gun bullets.

Marilù’s father is willing to pay the ransom. Commissario Grandi has no doubts that if the ransom is paid the girl will be killed anyway. And we know right from the start that that’s what Giulio intends to do.

As you might expect things get tense between the three hoodlums but Giulio’s plan seems to be working. The trail of corpses he leaves behind provide Commissario Grandi with vital clues but no hard evidence - dead witnesses don’t talk.

Tomas Milian plays Giulio as a vicious out-of-control thug. Any attempt to give the movie a political interpretation, to see Giulio as a representative of the suffering downtrodden masses, comes up against the problem that Giulio is one of the least sympathetic protagonists in movie history. He has no redeeming features. We feel no sympathy for him whatsoever. He’s always been a loser and we want to see him keep losing. Any attempt to see neo-noir elements in the film is similarly doomed. Giulio has not been corrupted or led astray or forced into a life of crime - he is rotten all the way through right from the start. We are entirely on the side of Commissario Grandi - we want to see Giulio hunted down like an animal and killed. Milian’s performance is remarkable in its sheer excessiveness.

Ray Loveock is pretty good as Carmine. He’s a marginally more sympathetic character perhaps but while he’s a jumpy nervous killer he’s still a killer. Henry Silva gives a fairly nuanced performance - Grandi does not come across as conforming to the usual movie cop clichés.

Lenzi had the ability to make interesting movies in lots of different genres and to avoid the obvious clichés. In this case having a screenplay by the great Ernesto Gastaldi certainly helped. This is a poliziottesco but the focus is less on the cops and more on the psycho killer.

There’s a fine car chase early on and the action scenes are well-mounted and are not lacking in shock effect.

Giulio might be unintelligent but his very ruthlessness makes him a formidable problem for the police. And he does have a certain crazed cunning. They might know that he is guilty but finding actual evidence is a problem since Giulio leaves no-one alive to give evidence against him. He really doesn’t care how many people he kills. Commissario Grandi seems to be coming up against a brick wall.

The plot is basic but Almost Human has style and energy and a great deal of raw power. Highly recommended.

This movie has had countless DVD and Blu-Ray releases. Severin’s is the most recent (in their Violent Streets Umberto Lenzi boxed set) and it looks great and includes a host of extras.

The Possessed (1965)

The Possessed (La donna del lago) is included in Arrow’s Giallo Essentials Red Blu-Ray boxed set. It’s supposed to be a proto-giallo and I generally enjoy proto-giallos (or proto-gialli) even more than fullblown giallos. Whether this movie really qualifies for such a label remains to be seen.

A writer named Bernard (Peter Baldwin) has just broken up with his girlfriend. He arrives at the lakeside hotel owned by Mr Enrico. Bernard spent a lot of time there as a boy and he was there a year ago as well. He tells himself he just wants to relax and get some work done on his new novel. He isn’t even fooling himself. He has come to see Tilde.

Tilde is a maid at the hotel. We assume that she and Bernard had a love affair the previous year and that Bernard wants to rekindle the romance.

Those hopes are soon dashed. Tilde is dead. She committed suicide.

Bernard’s photographer pal Francesco suggests to Bernard that perhaps there was more to Tilde’s death.

At this point you expect Bernard to stay playing amateur detective but he does so in a very halfhearted manner. In fact he does everything in a very halfhearted manner. He does pick up a few possible clues. It does seem possible that Tilde was murdered.

We get a few flashbacks but it’s not always clear if certain scenes really happened or are really happening or are happening purely in Bernard’s mind.

The atmosphere at the hotel is uneasy. The marriage of Mr Enrico’s son Mario (Philippe Leroy) to Adriana (Pia Lindström) seems unhappy. Mr Enrico’s daughter Irma (Valentina Cortese) seems tense. Mr Enrico seems troubled.

There are people who seem to be trying to lead Bernard to the truth and others determined to do the exact opposite.

Interestingly we never find out exactly what went on between Bernard and Tilde. At first we assume they were lovers but later we come to doubt that. Perhaps it was just an obsession on Bernard’s part. We have to consider the possibility that they never actually met, although it appears that he had been spying on her. Everything he thinks he knows about her may be misinterpretations on his part. He’s a writer. He lives in a world of imagination. Of course there’s also the possibility they really were lovers.

The extraordinary ambiguity of his obsession with Tilde is by far the best thing about this movie.

This movie is not a giallo. It’s not a proto-giallo. It has no connection whatsoever with the giallo genre. The visual style is the polar opposite of giallo visual style. It’s in black-and-white and I personally do not believe a black-and-white movie can be a giallo. The visuals are moody, sombre, low-key. There’s none of the characteristic giallo flamboyance. It’s not even film noir. The Possessed has more of the feel of a Bergman movie.

There’s no glamour. No sexiness. No hints of decadence. There are none of the identifying features of the proto-giallo.

This is an art film. As a thriller it doesn’t really work. It lacks actual thrills. It lacks action, it lacks suspense and the murder mystery elements are predictable.

That’s not to say that it’s a bad movie. It’s not without interest as a psychological study, as a meditation on memory (and the unreliability of memory) and the blurring of the line between imagination and reality. It just isn’t even remotely a giallo and it isn’t the slightest bit giallo-esque. Not only is it not a giallo. It’s almost an anti-giallo - the absolute antithesis of everything that defines the giallo. Of course co-directors Luigi Bazzoni and Franco Rossellini were not trying to make a giallo since the giallo did not exist as a distinct entity in 1965. They were presumably trying to make an art movie.

Labelling it as a giallo was probably the only way to make a Blu-Ray release commercially viable. The Blu-Ray transfer looks pretty decent. There are some extras as well.

The Possessed is a moderately interesting art/crime film. Worth a look if you’re going to buy the boxed set anyway.

Luigi Bazzoni would later make an actual giallo, the extremely good The Fifth Cord (1971). Which just happens to also be included in the same Arrow Blu-Ray boxed set.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (1973)

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable, released in 1973, was the third of the Female Prisoner Scorpion movies. Once again Meiko Kaji is the star and Shunya Itō is the director.

One of the cool things about the Japanese pinky violence movies is that there are often considerable differences between the various entries in a series.

If you haven’t seen the first two Female Prisoner Scorpion movies you won’t have the remotest idea what’s going on in this movie. You’ll be wondering why this girl is such a psycho bitch. If you have seen the first two movies you’ll understand. We do get snippets of her backstory in the course of the movie but nowhere near enough to make her personality comprehensible.

Matsu (Meiko Kaji), who gained the nickname Scorpion in prison, is on the run. The cops, led by Detective Kondo (Mikio Narita), almost catch her on the train. Poor Kondo has no idea what he is dealing with. There are two cops and one lone girl but if the girl is the Scorpion the odds are all on her side. The way she escapes is a fine illustration of the breathtaking excesses that make pinky violence movies so addictive. When you think you have Matsu cornered and helpless that’s when you should be really scared.

Matsu makes a friend. Yuki (Yayoi Watanabe) is a prostitute. She lives with her brain-damaged brother. She has sex with him regularly because it makes him happy.

Yuki has gangster problems. Those problems become Matsu’s problems. The first problem is Tanida (Takashi Fujiki). He knows Matsu is an escaped convict. He is going to force Matsu to provide him with regular sexual services. If she doesn’t play along he’ll turn her in. That annoys Matsu. Annoying Matsu is a seriously bad idea. The method Matsu adopts to deal with this problem is delightfully fiendish. It’s a woman’s revenge.

The other problem is sinister crazy sadistic procuress Katsu. Katsu had been in prison with Matsu. Katsu is a very tough very mean lady but she’s terrified of Matsu. She decides that Matsu will have to be dealt with.

Meanwhile Matsu still has the cops to deal with.

It all leads up to an extended pursuit through the city’s sewers, or at least we think that’s the finale but then we get a whole new subplot. And an amazing ending.

Stylistically this movie switches between gritty realism and outrageous theatricality.

One thing I like about the Female Prisoner Scorpion movies is that Matsu is not a typical kickass action heroine. She doesn’t have superpowers. She’s no stronger than any normal woman. She has no advanced unarmed combat skills. There are several factors that make her a formidable opponent. Firstly there’s her patience. She has the ability to withdraw into her shell and wait. She doesn’t care how long she has to wait. Eventually her chance will come. Then she strikes like a scorpion. And there’s her will to survive and her crazed savagery. When cornered she fights like a wounded panther at bay. She will do whatever it takes to survive. If she has to kill she will do so without hesitation. She will strike the death-blow without flinching. And she goes into a killing frenzy.

There’s a lot of emphasis in this film on Matsu’s utter aloneness. She cannot form emotional relationships with men. She cannot form friendships with other women. She trusts no-one. Yuki has some of the same problems. Both Matsu and Yuki need the friendship of another woman but can they learn to trust each other?

There’s a temptation to see Matsu as a feminist icon but in fact she’s a tragic figure. She has lost her humanity. She has been pursued and mistreated (often by other women) for so long that she has developed the personality of a hunted animal. We admire her extraordinary determination to survive but we feel desperately sorry for her. She was once a perfectly ordinary young woman. Now only a shell remains. She has survived in one sense, but perhaps not in other senses.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable is a weird disturbing movie but that description applies to all the movies of this series (and it applies to pinky violence movies in general). Highly recommended, but see the first two movies first.

All four movies in this cycle are included in Arrow’s Female Prisoner Scorpion Blu-Ray boxed set. The transfers are excellent. There are some extras, for those who bother with such things.

I’ve reviewed the first two movies in this series, Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972) and Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972). These movies absolutely have to be seen in production order.

Monster on the Campus (1958)

Monster on the Campus is a 1958 science fiction monster movie but it includes the words “directed by Jack Arnold” in the credits and that always inspires confidence. No matter how outlandish the ideas you know it will be a well-crafted movie.

This movie belongs to the smallest of all movie sub-genres - the coelacanth horror film. Yes, coelacanth, the famous “living fossils” - the fish species assumed to have been extinct for 60 million years before its rediscovery in the 1930s. These fish were at the time thought to have remained unchanged for several hundred million years. It was believed that they had not evolved at all. In this movie these odd fish spread horror and mayhem on an American university campus.

It all begins when the university acquires a fine specimen of a coelacanth. Professor Donald Blake (Arthur Franz) just can’t wait to start dissecting.

The coelacanth arrives in a truck, packed in a crate. While it’s being removed from the truck bloody water from the crate drips onto the roadway and Samson licks it. Samson is a German Shepherd, the much-loved mascot of a fraternity house. He’s a very friendly very gentle dog.

Shortly afterwards Samson turns savage. He has never done this before. He has to be locked in a cage for veterinary observation. Professor Blake notices something else very strange and inexplicable about the dog.

Professor Blake is feeling very tired and the campus nurse, Molly Riordan (Helen Westcott) offers to drive him home. Some hours later Molly’s dead body is discovered.

Professor Blake is now an obvious murder suspect but Detective Lieutenant Mike Stevens is inclined to think the professor is innocent. The fingerprint and footprint evidence seems to clinch the matter. Professor Blake is not the killer. But there is a killer loose on campus.

The footprints help to clear Blake but they mystify the cops. What kind of man could leave footprints like that?

Professor Blake comes up with a wild theory. I won’t spoil things by revealing his theory other than to say that it has to do with the peculiar nature of the coelacanth. The science stuff is this movie is delightfully silly and off-the-wall. You expect that in a 50s sci-fi monster movie, but in this case the insane pseudoscientific ideas are at least interesting and amusing and have some original elements.

The professor believes the giant dragonfly (two feet long) that flies into his laboratory window confirms his theory.

He tries to explain his theory to his department head and to his colleagues but they think he’s gone nuts.

His girlfriend Madeline (Joanna Moore) wants to stand by him but she thinks his theories are crazy as well.

Poor Molly was just the first victim of the mysterious monstrous campus killer.

Professor Blake eventually figures things out and comes up with a plan to destroy the monster.

The special effects and makeup effects are mostly laughably silly (especially the giant dragonfly) but surprisingly there’s a transformation scene that is superbly done.

The various cast members try to take it all very seriously which adds to the fun.

Jack Arnold made much much better movies than this but he does his best with the material he’s given.

The sheer lunacy of the premise is delightful. The fact that we’re meant to think the professor is a genius but his scientific methods are so sloppy adds more enjoyment.

This is not by any stretch of the imagination a great movie or even a particularly good one. It’s strictly a beer and popcorn movie. If that’s what you’re in the mood for it’s worth a look.

Universal's Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection offers five films on DVD and all are worth seeing. The Monolith Monsters (1957) is particularly good. Monster on the Campus gets a very nice transfer (the movie is in black-and-white).

The Living Skeleton (1968)

In the late 60s Japan’s Shochiku studio made a short-lived and tentative attempt to break into the booming market for science fiction, horror and monster movies. Criterion’s Eclipse Series 37 DVD boxed set When Horror Came to Shochiku includes four of the movies made at Shochiku at that time. When Horror Came to Shochiku is a cool name for a boxed set but a bit misleading since these movies are not quite what one would think as typical late 60s horror films.

The Living Skeleton (Kyûketsu dokuro-sen), made in 1968, is one of these four movies.

You have to bear in mind that this is not a low-budget independent film. It was made by a major studio, with the resources of a major studio. It was made by people who had learnt their craft in a studio system. They were professionals. They knew how to make movies. It has a certain amount of major studio polish.

The Living Skeleton opens in fairly spectacular style. A freighter, the Dragon King, has been captured by pirates. The setting is contemporary - it’s worth remembering that piracy still goes on today. These pirates are particularly ruthless and the crew and the handful of passengers are massacred.

Three years later we meet a young woman named Saeko (Kikko Matsuoka). She lives in a small Japanese costal town. She is an orphan and along with her identical twin sister Yoriko was more or less raised by the village priest. He’s a Catholic priest - Japan has a large Catholic community.

Saeko is a nice girl but she has been troubled since her twin sister disappeared. The sister is assumed to have been drowned when the freighter on which she was travelling went down in a typhoon. Of course the audience knows that the twin sister was killed by those pirates.

Saeko has a boyfriend, Mochizuki (Yasunori Irikawa). He’s a decent guy and they plan to get married.

They go scuba diving and see something unexpected - skeletons.

Later they see a ship. Not on the bottom of the sea, but afloat. Maybe it’s the ship on which Yoriko met her fate. Saeko wants to reach the ship, she does so, and she is disturbed by what she finds.

Then things get spooky for a bunch of people all of whom have something to hide. What they have to hide is connected with the events on board the Dragon King.

Viewers will have their suspicions about what is going on but it may not be so simple.

This is one of those movies that plays around with genre. You think you know what kind of movie it is and then you start to think it’s not that sort of movie at all. And then you find yourself thinking it could belong to any one of several genres. Is anything supernatural going on? Certainly strange creepy things happen. We’re kept guessing. Maybe we’ll get a definite answer at the end. You’ll have to watch the movie yourself to find out.

There are some nicely crazy plot twists.

There’s a touch of ambiguity to at least one major character. We might understand a character’s motivations without entirely approving of the actions to which those motivations lead.

We have to talk about the special effects. There are some very obvious miniatures shots. I don’t mind that. In fact in a movie such as this where you’re not always entirely certainly that everything you see is real or truthful obvious special effects can be an asset. There are some really ambitious effects shots and they’re often quite effective and disturbing.

This film was shot in the ’scope aspect ratio in black-and-white, a combination I always find rather appealing. The cinematography is suitably moody.

This movie has a lot of the qualities you expect in a horror exploitation movie combined with some genuinely unsettling atmosphere. It has some outlandish moments and a few crazy moments.

Overall The Living Skeleton is entertaining with enough weird touches to make it a cut above average. Highly recommended.

The DVD transfer is very good. So far I’ve watched three of the movies in the boxed set. The X from Outer Space (1967) is goofy fun while Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968) is delightfully demented.

Prince of Darkness (1987)

Prince of Darkness is a 1987 movie written and directed by John Carpenter that could be described as a return to the supernatural horror of The Fog but with some important differences.

Donald Pleasence is a very worried Catholic priest. An older priest has just died. That priest had belonged to an order called the Brotherhood of Sleep. For two thousand years a priest from that order has acted as a guardian of a terrible secret. Something that must remain confined. But it appears to be breaking out of its confinement.

Odd things are happening. Insects are behaving strangely. Homeless people are behaving very strangely indeed, as if they had some mysterious common purpose. The sky looks a bit funny. Everything just seems a tiny bit wrong somehow.

There’s also the old deceased priest’s diary, and a very ancient manuscript.

The priest begs Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong) for help. Birack believes in science not religion but he works on the frontiers of theoretical physics so he’s rather open-minded about ideas that sound crazy. Birack recruits a team of graduate students. They are going to investigate this matter scientifically.

What they have to investigate is a very ancient cylinder in a 500-year-old church crypt. They’ll need someone with experience in translating ancient religious texts as well. That manuscript may contain vital clues. In fact it contains things you would not expect in an ancient religious manuscript.

Donald Pleasence knows something of the history of the Brotherhood of Sleep. It’s very disturbing. It casts doubt not just on the accepted version of Christianity but on accepted scientific principles as well. There is a very ancient evil which is not the evil in which everyone has always believed. That evil is now awakening.

Or investigators do not even know what they’re dealing with much less what to do about it. And that evil may be intent on picking them off one by one. Maybe not killing them. Maybe something much worse.

This is a kind of variant on the classic haunted house story in which a group of people are stuck in a house in which ghostly manifestations are happening. The differences being that this is a haunted church and while the manifestations might be supernatural they are not ghostly as such.

Of course it could be debated whether this is a supernatural horror movie or a science fiction horror movie.

The ideas here are very cool and very frightening. The enigmatic nature of the evil makes it more scary. Carpenter builds the tension very effectively.

The special effects are generally impressive. This was 1987 and for commercial reasons there were going to have to be gross-out gore scenes. I always find such scenes to be cheesy even when they’re done well. Gore is just something that doesn’t impress me. I think that the ideas here are clever enough and creepy enough to make the gore unnecessary. I am of course in the minority on this issue and in strictly commercial terms Carpenter knew what he was doing.

I rarely notice film music but Carpenter’s music for this movie (which he composed himself) is memorable and very disturbing.

Donald Pleasence is of course very good, and Victor Wong is marvellous as the eccentric but brilliant and determined Professor Birack. The other cast members are all very solid. Look out for Alice Cooper in a memorable appearance as a terrifying homeless person.

Prince of Darkness has some affinities with Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing in that both movies deal with possession, of sorts. It also has definite affinities with The Legend of Hell House (1973) with its scientific investigation of a haunted house.

Prince of Darkness is a fine creepy horror film. John Carpenter really was on fire in the 80. Highly recommended.

I had previously only seen this movie in a terrible pan-and-scanned VHS release so seeing it on Studiocanal’s Blu-Ray release was a revelation. This release is packed to the gills with extras.

The Haunting (1963)

The Haunting, released in 1963, has the reputation of being one of the best ghost movies ever made. There was a remake in 1999 which I haven’t seen and don’t intend to see. It is the original 1963 version with which we are concerned here.

This was from the start a personal project for Robert Wise. He had read Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House and knew he just had to make it into a movie. The movie retains the novel’s New England setting but was shot in Britain. MGM’s British branch offered Wise the budget he needed.

Anthropologist Dr John Markway (Richard Johnson) is obsessed by the idea of scientifically proving the existence of the supernatural. For this he needs a haunted house. The notorious Hill House is ideal - it has a particularly sinister reputation. He will also need witnesses. He needs people who have had some previous encounter with the supernatural. Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris) and Theodora (Claire Bloom) seem suitable. The two women along with Dr Markway and Luke Sannerson (Russ Tamblyn), the nephew of the house’s current owner, will spend several days at Hill House.

Spooky things start to happen early on. Lots of disturbing noises. Cold spots. All clear signs (to Markway) of ghostly presences.

The story of the movie is the gradual disintegration of Eleanor. She provides voiceover narration so this is very much her story. Eleanor is pretty crazy to begin with. She has wasted her youth caring for her invalid mother. She is guilt-ridden over her mother’s death. She feels she doesn’t belong anywhere. It’s also a fair assumption that she is both sexually and emotionally frustrated. She is timid and mousy. We can be quite certain that she is a virgin.

We can be quite certain that Theodora is no virgin. She’s Eleanor’s polar opposite - sophisticated, worldly, confident, comfortable with being a woman, outgoing and sexy.

There is immediate tension between these two women.

Apart from the noises nothing obviously supernatural happens. The four people in the house cannot be certain at first that there is anything inexplicable going on. Odd noises in old houses are not unusual. Dr Markway believes the sounds are evidence of the supernatural, but that’s what he wants to believe. Eleanor becomes convinced that the house wants her in some way. She becomes increasingly distraught and unstable.

The spiral staircase scene is terrifying but again there’s no certainty that anything supernatural is occurring. It’s a decaying old house and such houses are full of perfectly natural dangers. Of course eventually someone is going to crack and try to escape, but will the house let anyone leave?

Wise, cinematographer Davis Boulton and and production designer Elliot Scott create the right gothic atmosphere without resorting to the obvious. There are no cobwebs. No crypts. No mysteriously empty coffins. No mysterious figures glimpsed on the battlements. Wise and Boulton do employ plenty of camera tricks. Exterior shots of the house were shot using infra-red film. Wide-angle lenses were used. Things look distorted, but in a fairly subtle way which adds to the creepiness. Eleanor thinks the house is watching her and that’s the impression the audience gets as well.

There are so many ways this movie can be interpreted. We do eventually have fairly clear signs that something outside the range of the normal laws of nature is occurring but what it is remains obscure, and Wise wants it to be obscure. These people are isolated and highly suggestible.

Does the evil come from the man who built the house ninety years earlier, wicked old Hugh Crain? Does it come from his daughter Abigail, or from the nurse who allowed Hugh Crain’s wife to die? Does it come from some demonic entity? Does the evil come from the house itself? Or does it come from Eleanor? Is there in fact anything supernatural going on or is it just Eleanor’s madness? You will have to decide for yourself. Wise has no intention of spoon-feeding the viewer with a glib explanation. What I do like is that neither a supernatural nor a non-supernatural explanation can simply be dismissed out of hand.

The lesbian sub-text between Theo and Eleanor feels a bit tacked on but it does serve the purpose of increasing Eleanor’s feelings of isolation. Her normal instinct would be to turn to another woman for emotional support but she does not want to turn to Theo. And it certainly adds extra tension.

This is also a movie about a woman falling apart, and Eleanor has been falling apart for a very long time. She sees Hill House not so much as a threat but more as her last chance to find herself.

This would make a great double bill with Kubrick’s The Shining - there are some striking similarities in the way these two films approach the haunted house movie.

The Haunting is an object lesson in how to do horror that is very subtle indeed, and very frightening indeed. Highly recommended.

Blood: The Last Vampire (2000)

Blood: The Last Vampire is a fascinating anime film that, with its running time of 48 minutes, is not quite a feature film.

It was shot in a mixture of Japanese and English. The Japanese characters speak Japanese and sometimes English, the American characters speak English. There’s also a mixture of traditional animation techniques and CG and you’ll either like that blending or you won’t depending on personal taste. Overall I found the visuals to be effective and atmospheric.

It starts in a wonderfully enigmatic fashion. It is Japan in the 1960s. A young Japanese girl (we will later learn that her name is Saya) slaughters a passenger on a train with a samurai sword. Then she is joined by a couple of American guys. David might be Saya’s boss. He might work for the Japanese Government or the US Government or for some shady outfit like the CIA or he might work for some private organisation. Whoever or whatever he is he is in the same line of work as Saya - killing chiropterans. We don’t yet know what chiropterans are.

There’s some tension between Saya and David but there’s obviously some trust as well. Maybe they’re uneasy allies but they’re definitely allies.

Then Saya goes undercover as a student at the school for the children of American military personnel at a U.S. Air Force base in Japan. For some reason she wears a Japanese schoolgirl uniform although it’s an American school. Saya looks rather weird dressed that way - she doesn’t look like a cute teenager, she looks like a stone-cold killer.

She has an uneasy encounter with the school nurse. The school nurse gets very disturbed when Saya whips out her sword and slices up another girl student in front of her. The nurse is horrified but she’s even more horrified when she gets a good look at her first chiropteran. They’re horrifying demon monsters.

We then get a rollercoaster ride of action and mayhem.

What I love most about this film is the thing that a lot of people dislike. It gives us nothing but tantalising hints at the backstory. You expect a Van Helsing-like character or a scientist to pop up to explain what is going on. But that doesn’t happen. We have to figure things out for ourselves.

We find out a few things about Saya but they raise more questions than they answer. The very short running time means there’s no time for detailed explanations. We are plunged straight into very strange and frightening events and we really don’t know much more than the unfortunate school teacher caught in the middle.

Which makes things much scarier. We don’t know the full extent or the exact nature of the threat. We don’t know how heavily the odds are stacked against Saya.

This is a very stripped-down very minimalist story. There are no subplots. Virtually no exposition. It hits the ground running and the pace remains frenetic. I like that. I’m told there was a later live-action version with double the running time that ruined the story by adding the backstory that was very deliberately and wisely left out of the original.

Right at the end we find out something very important about Saya but once again we don’t get a full explanation. It answers some of our questions but it adds further puzzles.

There was clearly a reason for choosing the mid-60s as the time setting and for including Vietnam War footage. Presumably the point was that we humans are every bit as bloodthirsty as the chiropterans. Fortunately this stuff isn’t intrusive and it does add to the atmosphere of paranoia.

Saya reappears as a character in the 2011 TV series Blood-C.

Hiroyuki Kitakubo directed. Blood: The Last Vampire was made by Production I.G. and originated in a study group set up by Mamoru Oshii (director of Ghost in the Shell) to explore ideas for future films. Kenji Kamiyama wrote the screenplay. He went on to be director and chief writer for the excellent Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex TV series.

Blood: The Last Vampire is very much about style. That style is very harsh, dark and brooding. This may be the least cutesy anime ever made. Very entertaining movie. Highly recommended.

The Manga DVD (they’ve now released in on Blu-Ray as well) looks very good and includes a “making of” featurette which is interesting for the insights it offers into the aesthetic choices that were made.