Event Horizon (1997)

Event Horizon is a 1997 Anglo-American-Canadian science fiction/horror movie that starts off as a blatant rip-off of Alien but then heads off in a totally new direction.

In 2040 the experimental spaceship Event Horizon disappears without trace in the vicinity of the orbit of the planet Neptune. The craft was designed for deep space exploration but the exact nature of its mission and the exact nature of the spacecraft itself are top-secret. Seven years later a transmission is picked up from the Event Horizon. It’s a very strange transmission which is suddenly cut off. But it’s enough to justify sending a rescue mission.

The rescue ship is the Lewis and Clark. The crew is the usual assortment you expect in such a science fiction movie. There’s the very serious martinet Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) who has a deep sense of duty. There’s a rebellious misfit. There’s a female medical lab technician who is tortured by personal problems. There’s the young rookie who will almost certainly crack up under pressure. There’s Starck (Joely Richardson), an essential member of the crew because without her the movie wouldn’t have a sexy female cast member.

And of course there’s the outsider, a scientist named Weir (Sam Neill). Naturally the crew don’t trust him. It’s always a bad idea to trust scientists. They trust him even less when they find out that he was the designer of the Event Horizon, and they really really don’t trust him at all when they find out the Event Horizon’s secret. That ship was built to test a gravity drive that would create artificial wormholes allowing faster-than-light travel. At the heart of the gravity drive is a black hole. Black holes are dangerous. Everybody knows that.

They find the Event Horizon easily enough. It’s deserted. They do find bloodstains. Lots of bloodstains. We know what’s going to happen next. Monsters are going to appear. But that doesn’t happen. There is evil aboard the Event Horizon, but it’s a different kind of evil. This is where this movie departs radically from Alien.

It become clear that the gravity drive had worked, after a fashion. The Event Horizon certainly left our solar system. Where it went to is unknown. How it got back is unknown.

The original script was a standard Alien rip-off. Director Paul W.S. Anderson wasn’t interested in doing it unless it was totally rejigged. Anderson wanted to make a ghosts in outer space movie. More specifically he wanted to make a haunted house in space movie. A movie that would draw heavily on two of his favourite movies, Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) and Kubrick’s The Shining. Anderson wanted to do what Wise and Kubrick had done - not show any actual monsters or ghosts. The evil would be formless, nameless, inexplicable, mysterious and invisible. The audience would see plenty of evil and horror, but all of it would be the consequence of that formless invisible evil.

One of this movie’s strengths is that it doesn’t offer a clear-cut explanation. There is mention of Hell but it would be simplistic to believe that the spacecraft had literally traveled to Hell. It may however have gone somewhere equally nasty, a place that would seem like Hell. We don’t know where the evil comes from or where it resides. We don’t know what it wants. We don’t know if it’s sentient.

The Event Horizon spacecraft is a bit like the Overlook Hotel, but in space. And maybe Weir is a bit like Jack Torrance.

Things get progressively weirder and nastier. With lots of gore and splatter.

I must confess that this is the only Paul W.S. Anderson movie I’ve ever seen. This is a movie in which the characters don’t matter much and the plot is deliberately vague. It’s all about the atmosphere of dread and doom, and even more emphatically it’s all about the visuals.

And the visuals are spectacular. There’s some CGI but Anderson wanted to rely mostly on practical effects. The spacecraft interior sets are impressive, with a bit of a high-tech grunge feel. The miniatures work is extremely good.

Anderson wanted a religious feel. He wanted the design of the Event Horizon to be based on the Cathedral of Notre Dame and surprisingly it’s an idea that works. He also wanted hints of stained glass windows. And curves. Lots of curved surfaces.

Event Horizon is not trying to be particularly profound. Anderson was not tying to make Citizen Kane in space, or The Seventh Seal in space. He wanted to make a horror movie about a haunted spaceship that would be weird and creepy and scary and on the whole he succeeded. It certainly is mostly a collection of ideas from other movies but they’re combined effectively and in a reasonably original way. Event Horizon is a big-budget popcorn movie but it’s fine entertainment. Highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray looks terrific and there are lots of extras including a commentary track by the director and the producer.

Young Hannah, Queen of the Vampires (1973)

Young Hannah, Queen of the Vampires (AKA Crypt of the Living Dead) is a 1973 Spanish-US gothic horror movie. It was part of the trend at the time to do gothic horror in contemporary settings so the story takes place in the 1970s.

Chris (Andrew Prine) arrives on a remote Mediterranean island to find out how his father died. The circumstances were mysterious. He was crushed under a four-ton stone sarcophagus.

The setting might be the present day but in fact it could have been set any time in the preceding hundred years or so. The island is sparsely inhabited and incredibly backward. There are no cars, there seem to be no telephones and no electricity. The islanders are steeped in superstition. They’re still living in the mental world of the Middle Ages.

There are two other Americans on the island, Peter (Mark Damon) and his sister Mary (Patty Sheppard). Mary teaches at the island’s one and only tiny school.

That sarcophagus is the resting place of Hannah. She was a French noblewoman. She was interred on the island by Louis VII on his way to the Second Crusade. She has lain in her sarcophagus for seven hundred years. But nobody on the island believes she is dead. They believe she was interred alive and still lives, in some way. For Hannah was a vampire.

The island was at one time known as the Island of the Vampires. What Chris doesn’t know is that there is still a vampire cult on the island.

Chris wants to bury his father. To do that he needs to move the sarcophagus. To do that he has to remove the lid. Chris is warned that this will free Hannah but he doesn’t believe in such foolish superstitions.

Mary does believe. She cannot change Chris’s mind but events will soon accomplish that. The corpses start to pile up. Chris realises that he has unleashed something evil and terrifying.

There are important things that Chris doesn’t know. He has more to worry about than the vampiress Hannah.

Of course Chris and Mary fall for each other.

There are plenty of conventional gothic horror visual clichés but the great thing about such clichés is that as long as they’re executed with a modicum of skill they always work. They work pretty well here.

The island setting works well too. There’s no escape from the horrors. And on such a remote island the survival of ancient fears seems plausible.

The major problem is that Hannah just doesn’t seem like a very formidable vampire. There’s no real sense of menace.

The acting from the three principals is quite adequate.

The movie was shot in Turkey and there are indications that the island is supposed to be a Turkish island.

The feel of this film is very American. One can’t help feeling that an Italian or a Spanish director would have extracted a bit more from what is a perfectly decent gothic horror movie setup.

The horror is very mild. There’s no nudity and no sex. For 1972 it’s very very tame. There is one very brief tantalising hint of an incest subplot but it’s immediately forgotten and never mentioned again. This movie desperately needed to be spiced up a bit, and livened up a bit.

Oddly enough this was apparently a Spanish movie (directed by Julio Salvador) which was subjected to drastic re-editing and had a lot of extra scenes shot in California by Ray Danton. It would be nice if the original Spanish film surfaced one day as it was apparently much less tame and bland. But the exact details of this movie’s production history are very murky.

Not a great movie but kind of fun if you don’t set your expectations too high.

I bought the very old VCI DVD which is letterboxed. I have no problems with that. I don’t mind as long as a movie isn’t pan-and-scanned.

Web of the Spider (1971)

Antonio Margheriti’s Web of the Spider (the original Italian title is Nella stretta morsa del ragno) is a colour remake of his excellent 1964 gothic horror film Castle of Blood which had starred Barbara Steele. I love the fact that the German title was Dracula im Schloß des Schreckens even though it has nothing to do with Dracula or vampires.

It begins with Edgar Allan Poe (played by Klaus Kinski!) in London which is cool because Poe certainly never visited England. Poe is being interviewed by an American reporter, Alan Foster (Anthony Franciosa). Poe claims that his stories of the strange and the supernatural are all in fact quite true. There really is life beyond the grave. Of a sort. Perhaps the dead are dead in some ways but not in others.

At this point it should be noted that the movie has no connection with any of Poe’s stories, but it’s a gothic horror movie so why not include Poe as a character?

Foster is introduced to Lord Thomas Blackwood. Blackwood owns a famous haunted castle. Foster accepts a wager, that he will not be able to survive a night in the castle. No-one who has ever tried it has returned to tell the tale. Foster is a rationalist. He doesn’t believe in ghosts. He has no doubt that he will have no problem spending a night at Blackwood Castle.

The castle is uninhabited but that doesn’t worry Foster.

To his surprise the castle isn’t deserted after all as he discovers when he meets the beautiful young woman who lives there. She is Lord Blackwood’s sister, Elisabeth Blackwood (Michèle Mercier). There’s another gorgeous babe as well, Julia (Karin Field). As far as Forster is concerned things are looking up.

In fact the castle is full of people. Maybe they’re alive and maybe they aren’t. Maybe this is the present and maybe it’s the past.

There are certainly some romantic and sexual dramas being played out. Perhaps they just go on being played out over and over again.

Foster has of course fallen in love with Elisabeth. She is in love with him, or so he assumes.

Elisabeth has a husband and she has a lover, Herbert (Raf Baldassarre). Or at least she did once have a husband and a lover.

The mysterious Dr Carmus (Peter Carsten) has tried to explain things to Foster. Carmus’ theories are similar to Poe’s. The point at which life ends depends upon what you mean by life.

Foster isn’t sure if he is really involved in these dramas from the past or not. He’s a pretty confused guy. He just knows that he wants Elisabeth.

While this was an attempt to update Castle of Blood by remaking it in colour Web of the Spider doesn’t really feel like a 1970s gothic horror movie. It has a bit of a retro feel. In fact visually it’s reminiscent in some ways of Roger Corman’s Poe movies, but done with a European sensibility. That’s actually no bad thing. It’s also fairly tame by 1971 standards, with nothing more than brief topless nudity.

This is obviously a ghost story, but then again it isn’t. It doesn’t fit neatly into a particular gothic horror sub-genre (which is true of so many Italian gothic horror movies of that era). It deals with what might be described as ghosts but they’re not the kinds of ghosts you find in most ghost stories. They’re not vampires but maybe in a sense they are undead. Whether or not they’re dead or undead depends on your definition of such terms. Of course they might be illusions. Italian gothic horror movies tended to ignore strict genre conventions and also to deal in a certain amount of ambiguity. Web of the Spider revels in ambiguity.

I liked the ending a great deal.

To enjoy this movie you have to take it on its own terms without constantly comparing it to Castle of Blood. It’s a remake but it has a different feel. Being in colour it obviously has a very different aesthetic. I personally like the aesthetic of Web of the Spider. I do have one minor aesthetic quibble - Anthony Franciosa looks too much like he’s just stepped out of the 1970s.

Apparently Margheriti was disappointed by this film but directors are often poor judges of their own work. He was obviously proud of Castle of Blood (and rightly so) and presumably was therefore inclined to judge Web of the Spider harshly.

All of Margheriti’s movies were made on very limited budgets. He was used to that. Like all Italian genre directors of that era he knew how to get good results with very little money.

Of course Michèle Mercier was no Barbara Steele. She can’t match Steele’s magnetism, charisma and sense of dangerous exotic eroticism. No-one could. Mlle Mercier does a pretty effective job. Klaus Kinski is, it goes without saying, delightfully deranged as Poe. Poe was obviously added as a character because his name was a major box-office draw but the framing story involving Poe works quite well.

Web of the Spider is enjoyable slightly offbeat gothic horror. Highly recommended.

The German DVD release, with the title Dracula im Schloß des Schreckens, includes the English dubbed version. That’s the release I have. The transfer is very good. Lots of scenes had been cut from the English dubbed version (which probably explains the movie’s poor reputation). They’re restored here, but in Italian (or sometimes German) with English subtitles and from an inferior source. On the whole the DVD is excellent. There is a German Blu-Ray release as well but I am not sure that it is English-friendly. There’s also a hard-to-find Garagehouse Pictures Blu-Ray.

The Stepmother (1972)

The Stepmother is a 1972 erotic thriller released through Crown International so you’re expecting standard drive-in fodder. 

It was written and directed by Howard Avedis. More about him later.

Structurally this movie is as much a police procedural as an erotic thriller and it can also be regarded as an inverted mystery, in which the viewer knows the identity of the murderer right from the start and the interest of the story lies in the way in which the killer is brought to justice.

The movie opens with a woman having sex with a man somewhat against her will. This encounter is witnessed by a man whom we presume to be the woman’s jealous husband. The husband then kills the other man.

I’m not giving away any spoilers here. This all happens in the first few minutes.

This movie adds an interesting twist. There’s a second murder at roughly the same time and it would be obvious to even the greenest cop that the two murders are related. That’s the one thing in the case that is an absolute certainty. Inspector Darnezi (John Anderson) has no doubts on this score.

I’m not giving away any spoilers here either. All of this is just the initial setup.

That jealous husband is architect Frank Delgado (Alejandro Rey). The woman we saw at the start is his second wife Margo (Catherine Justice). Frank is successful and he and Margo are part of a little circle of rich people with slightly arty tendencies. There’s a hint of early 70s Southern California decadence. This was a world in which drugs and bed-hopping were popular pastimes in such circles. Frank doesn’t quite fit in. He’s Mexican and he’s a devout Catholic.

This little circle includes Frank’s business partner Dick Hill (Larry Linville) and Dick’s wife Sonya (Marlene Schmidt) as well as a maker of blue movies who goes by the name of Goof and Goof’s girlfriend.

There are some tensions. For one thing Frank isn’t entirely sure he can trust Margo not to sleep around.

Things get more complicated when Frank’s son Steve (Rudy Herrera Jr) arrives from Mexico. There’s definitely tension between Steve and Margo. Maybe not surprising given that Steve’s stepmother isn’t all that older than he is and she’s very hot and she’s a woman in touch with her sexual appetites.

There’s also another killing.

We know that events are moving towards a crisis and Avedis handles the sense of impending doom quite well. We don’t know what form the crisis will take. There are several distinct possibilities.

The plot is a bit loose. Avedis’s screenplay has a few clunky moments.

The biggest problem is that it’s all very tame. The ingredients were there for a steamy erotic thriller and in the 80s or early 90s that’s how it would have played out (and that’s certainly how an Italian director would have approached it). The Stepmother however never develops any real erotic heat and never really catches fire. It’s not quite sleazy enough.

Alejandro Rey is good as a man on the edge. His life is out of control. Catherine Justice is pretty good as Margo although the script doesn’t give her enough opportunities to smoulder.

Directed Howard Avedis was born Hikmet Labib Avedis in Iraq. He directed several movies in Iraq before relocating to the United States where he produced and directed a series of low-budget movies. He gets virtually no respect as a film-maker, being generally dismissed as a director of cheap drive-in trash. That’s rather unfair. I’ve now seen three of his movies and they’re rather interesting and slightly offbeat. Both The Teacher (1974) and The Fifth Floor are worth seeing.

The Stepmother is nowhere near as bad as its reputation would suggest. Not as good as the other Howard Avedis movies I’ve seen but it’s enjoyable in a 70s drive-in movie way. Recommended.

It’s included in several multi-movie DVD sets from Mill Creek. The transfer is very good.

N. Took the Dice (1971)

When Alain Robbe-Grillet made Eden and After in 1970 he was actually shooting two movies simultaneously. One, Eden and After, was intended for theatrical release. The second, N. Took the Dice (N. a pris les dés…), was to be a TV-movie for French television. Both movies were made with the exact same crew and the exact same cast. Most of the footage used in both films is identical. What Robbe-Grillet then did was to take the footage he’d shot and edit it into two entirely different movies. 

And they really are entirely different movies, even if they do incorporate the same repertoire of themes and images.

The cast members are the same and they wear the same costumes and often they’re performing in the exact same scenes but they’re not necessarily playing the same characters. And often the dialogue has been changed.

We see many of the same scenes in both movies but they have entirely different meanings. There’s a scene in which a character is being chased around a cafe. In one version that character is in real danger, in the other the two people are clearly engaged in good-natured horseplay.

The footage has been radically re-edited. The entire sequence of shots and events has been shuffled around. Scenes that appear at the end of Eden and After appear at the beginning of N. Took the Dice. Which totally changes the meaning and the significance of those scenes. The meaning of a shot comes from the context. Change the context and you change the meaning.

In both movies a young woman played by Catherine Jourdan owns a very valuable painting. She looks the same but she may not be the same woman in both movies. In one version the painting is by a famous artist, in the other it was done by one of her fellow students.

At one point there’s the exact same shot in both movies but in one version a man is killed, in the other he’s totally uninjured.

In both versions the woman played by Catherine Jourdan is kidnapped in Tunisia, by the same actors wearing the same costumes in the same shots, but the kidnappers are different people in the two versions.

There’s no real plot in Eden and After, just a succession of themes and images with only tenuous connections. N. Took the Dice has even less of a plot.

In N. Took the Dice the technique used by Robbe-Grillet is made more overt. We get a man named N. throwing dice, with the sequence of the scenes clearly determined by the random fall of the dice.

In both movies we’re left to wonder how much is dream, how much is drug-induced hallucination, how much is a movie within a movie. N. Took the Dice adds the suggestion that some of the events are in fact part of a television game show.

Robbe-Grillet was a very playful director and that comes cross in both these movies. There’s plenty of artiness and complexity but there’s fun as well.

Being a TV-movie N. Took the Dice naturally has most of the nudity removed although some of the hints of sadomasochism remain. This movie is so far removed from reality that it’s difficult to see how anyone could take offence.

N. Took the Dice is typical Robbe-Grillet which means it’s highly recommended.

The BFI have released this film on DVD and Blu-Ray. Eden and After and N. Took the Dice are both on the same disc. The transfer is extremely good. I have also reviewed Eden and After.

Eden and After (1970)

Eden and After, released in 1970, is probably Alain Robbe-Grillet’s weirdest most perplexing most experimental and most avant-garde movie. Surprisingly it actually made money. The 70s were different.

Eden and After was intended for theatrical release and was made in tandem with N. Took the Dice which was intended for French television. It’s sometimes assumed that the latter was simply Eden and After toned down for TV but it’s actually not the same film at all even though it shares huge amounts of footage.

There’s no point in talking about the script. The movie didn’t have one. Robbe-Grillet had charts of themes, ideas and images the movie would touch on and basically improvised from there. It’s like a series of episodes which may be connected in some way but the connections are enigmatic. Whether any of these episodes are real is up to the viewer to decide. Each of the five sections of the film would deal with twelve different thematic ideas. Don’t jump to the conclusion that the whole thing is a dream. That would be a wildly simplistic reading of a fiendishly complex film.

The movie starts with a rape, followed by a game of Russian roulette which ends in tragedy. This might sound like uncomfortable viewing but it’s not because it’s just a game and that’s obvious right from the start. There will be lots more games.

A group of bored university students hang out at the Eden cafe (which looks like a Mondrian painting turned into a building). They play elaborate games. The games become more elaborate. Perhaps the games become real, or perhaps they don’t.

The first section of the movie deals with these games.

Then we get a major change in the second section with the arrival of The Stranger (we will later find out that his name might be Duchemin or he might be the Dutchman). He’s an older man and the students seem inclined to follow his lead.

He gives Violette (Catherine Jourdan) a drug which he claims that he obtained in Africa. He calls it the powder of fear. It certainly induces fear in Violette. The Stranger then gives her the antidote. Since the antidote is pure water we might feel inclined to suspect that the powder of fear contained no drug at all - that Violette was merely responding to a kind of hypnotic suggestion.

Violette (Catherine Jourdan) owns a small but very valuable painting. It’s an abstract painting but it’s slightly reminiscent of houses in Tunisia. The action will later move to Tunisia, possibly. Her boyfriend suggest that they sell the painting to finance a trip to Tunisia by the whole group.

The third section moves the action to a huge factory. Violette seems to be pursued by some of the male students we saw earlier but we can’t be certain the actors are still playing the same characters.

The fourth section takes is set in Tunisia. Or maybe we’re not in Tunisia, maybe we’re in a movie about Tunisia that Violette was watching. We see the same actors and actresses we saw earlier but playing quite different roles. Everyone in this movie has a double.

In the fifth section we’re still in Tunisia where Violette is held prisoner. This section gives us an actual narrative or perhaps it tempts us into believing it’s an actual narrative. Violette is to be forced by her kidnappers to reveal the location of that painting. This finally leads us to an enigmatic ending which might explain everything or nothing.

An interesting feature of this movie is that there’s nothing green in it because Robbe-Grillet detested the colour green. He loved Tunisia because at the right time of year everything green was dead.

Catherine Jourdan was not supposed to be the star but Robbe-Grillet was so impressed by her that he kept giving her more screen time until she became in fact the star.

Surrealism is very difficult to pull off successfully. That’s the case in any medium but it’s especially true in film. If it’s done badly it seems merely silly, being bizarre for the sake of being bizarre. To be successful the viewer has to have a feeling that what seems meaningless actually does have a meaning, if only that meaning could be uncovered. It has to have a genuinely unsettling quality, as if the rules have been changed but there are still rules. It’s just that those rules are mysterious and unfathomable. Maybe the rules are unknown even to the creator of the work.

This movie also has a certain trippy quality, but it’s a million miles away from the trippiness of American movies of its era. There’s no influence of hippie culture. There’s no trace of psychedelia. The trippiness doesn’t come from crude camera tricks and it doesn’t feel like drug-induced trippiness. This is more cerebral, more like a genuine exploration of the elusiveness of reality than just an acid trip. There are drugs in the movie but to see the story as a drug-induced delusion would be as misleading as seeing it as a dream. The border between illusion and reality can be fuzzy, as can the border between reality and art. In this movie we’re not seeing a simulacrum of reality, we are inhabiting a work of art.

This is not quite surrealism but it’s certainly influenced by surrealism as well as being influenced by various modernist movements in art and literature.

One thing that’s interesting about this movie is that it appears to include a rape, several murders and several scenes of torture but in fact there’s no violence at all. All these acts of violence are so ostentatiously stylised and artificial that we are not for one second expected to see them as real. There’s one particularly brilliant scene in which a woman is tortured, but actually she is not being tortured at all. She is not harmed even slightly. The torture takes place in her own mind through the power of suggestion.

This is a very non-Hollywood movie that makes no concessions to realism. Modern viewers will likely take offence at all sorts of things here but none of these things actually happens.

Eden and After is reminiscent of Just Jaeckin’s Gwendoline (1984) in the sense that it employs sadomasochistic and fetishistic imagery in an obviously playful way. There are hints of sadomasochistic in Robbe-Grillet’s earliest films but it’s something that plays an increasing role in his later movies.

A particular highlight is a scene which brings Marcel Duchamps’ famous modernist painting Nude Descending a Staircase No 2 to life. It’s very cleverly done.

Eden and After is fascinating and hypnotic and it’s highly recommended.

The BFI have released this film on DVD and Blu-Ray. The disc includes a helpful audio commentary by Tim Lucas and also includes N. Took the Dice.

If you’re new to Robbe-Grillet’s movies I’m not sure that I’d start with this one. L’Immortelle, Trans-Europ Express, Successive Slidings of Pleasure, La Belle Captive and Playing with Fire are more accessible and more fun. They’re not quite as aggressively experimental and avant-garde.

I will also review N. Took the Dice.

Too Beautiful To Die (1988)

Too Beautiful To Die (Sotto il vestito niente II) is a 1988 giallo which is a kind of sequel to Carlo Vanzina’s 1985 Nothing Underneath (AKA The Last Shot).

Nothing Underneath had been a huge hit. It was hardly surprising that that movie’s producer, Achille Manzotti, was keen to do a follow-up. Too Beautiful To Die is not actually a sequel, but it is a movie in much the same style with a similar setting, the same modelling world background and lots of thematic similarities.

Manzotti hired Dario Piana to direct, a bold but appropriate choice. Piana has made only a tiny handful of feature films but he has been an immensely successful director of TV commercials. He was the right man to achieve the kind of look that the movie needed. Manzotti, Piana and Claudio Mancini wrote the screenplay.

This belongs to a particular sub-genre, the giallo set in the world of fashion modelling. In fact the world of of fashion modelling, TV commercials and music videos. A world of sleaze, but the kind of sleaze that the rich and famous enjoy.

The setting is Milan, and Milan in the 80s had a reputation for being a very rich very decadent city that was a major hub in the worlds of art, entertainment, music and fashion.

Alex Conti (Giovanni Tamberi) runs a very high-priced modelling agency. He’s a bit creepy (in a very 80s way) and he sometimes procures girls for very rich men, who require more than modelling from the girls. So he’s a kind of very high-class pimp on the side.

This time it’s all gone horribly wrong. A private party ends in a rape. A model disappears. There’s a car crash. There’s a corpse. And there’s a cop asking questions.

Police Lieutenant Brandam (François Marthouret) isn’t entirely happy about that car crash. The timing seems all wrong. His cop instinct tells him that it smells wrong.

Lieutenant Brandam is a very quiet, easy-going kind of guy, just a regular guy really. The kind of guy you feel you can talk to. Which of course makes him an effective policeman.

David (François-Eric Gendron) is very unhappy. That missing model was supposed to be the centrepiece in his latest music video.

Pretty soon he’s not the only one who’s unhappy. There’s a murder that takes place right in the middle of the shooting of the music video but in such a way that nobody sees it.

This won’t be the last murder.

All the models who were at that unlucky party are feeling nervous.

The plot is reasonably well-constructed with some decent misdirection. We know, and Lieutenant Brandam knows, that the events at that party were the catalyst for all the murders but that doesn’t help at all in indicating the murderer’s identity.

One thing I like about this movie is that Piana doesn’t rely on gore. The murders are not that bloody. They are however cleverly set up and very nicely shot. The murder during the music video shoot is particularly ingenious. Piana pulls off some very impressive visual set-pieces.

The setting in the world of fashion photography and music videos obviously suggests that voyeurism will be a bit of a theme here. There are several photographic clues, including a photograph of one of the murders. One of the key characters has an apartment loaded with cameras keeping his guests under surveillance. The often unsuccessful attempts by the police to keep suspects under surveillance are crucial. Lots of things get observed in this movie but the observation does not always lead to results.

Too Beautiful To Die has a very 80s aesthetic. It’s an aesthetic that has often been sneered at (even in the 80s) although in recent years cult movie fans seem to have learnt to appreciate its distinctive coke-fuelled excessive decadent glamour.

This movie is obviously drawing on the traditions of the giallo (a genre that had by this time been around for twenty years), and perhaps particularly on the late 60s giallos which were often set amongst what was known at the time as the Jet Set. I think it’s reasonable also to see a bit of a Miami Vice influence.

There are also some fetishistic touches. There are the bizarre and elaborate knives used as props in the music video, knives that also get used as murder weapons. These are knives that can be used for play, or for killing. The costumes in the music video definitely have fetishistic overtones. They are slightly reminiscent of some of the costumes used in Just Jaeckin’s wonderful 1984 movie Gwendoline (and it’s interesting to note that Jaeckin had been a fashion photographer). And Jaeckin’s Gwendoline had been inspired by The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline, the fetish comic strip created by John Willie in the 1930s.

It hardly needs to be added that the mention of fetishism is very relevant in discussing a movie that deals with the worlds of fashion modelling and music videos which are very much about fetishism.

This film has been criticised for a lack of psychological depth. I think this misses the point. These people are supposed to be shallow. And the movie is more interested in the ethical vacuum and emotional emptiness of their lives than in individual personality quirks.

It’s also appropriate that a movie about models should be stylish, and Too Beautiful To Die is very stylish indeed. I love the over-the-top 80s aesthetic. And it’s very decadent. It’s also well paced and it has plenty of suspense. It was underrated at the time and it remains underrated. Highly recommended.

The Nucleus Films Blu-Ray looks gorgeous and has plenty of extras.

I reviewed the excellent Nothing Underneath not too long ago.