Sisters (1972)

The release of Sisters in 1972 marked the arrival of Brian De Palma as a director. Before that he’d made lots of experimental avant-garde stuff, much of it totally improvised. By 1972 he had realised what a waste of time such stuff was. Sisters was his first real movie. There’s nothing improvised here. De Palma had it all planned out. Sisters was made on a low budget but it’s polished and professional. It gets seriously weird and perverse and twisty but De Palma is in complete control.

He unsettles us right from the start. Why are we watching a goofy TV game show? Well, the goofy TV game show is called Peeping Toms and it sets the stage for a movie that deals heavily in voyeurism.

He’s doing some serious riffing on Rear Window early on and he’s being very open about it. A woman is looking out her window and sees a murder through the window of another building across a courtyard. Just like Rear Window. In Rear Window the witness is a photojournalist. In Sisters the witness is Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt), a journalist. And like L.B. Jefferies in Rear Window she has not a shred of hard evidence. 

But De Palma is playing with us because he’s doing some riffing on another Hitchcock movie as well but to reveal the name of that movie would give away a major spoiler. 

Then the major plot strand kicks in. The murderess, a cute French-Canadian model named Danielle (Margot Kidder) has a sister, Dominique. And that’s a really bizarre story that is  slowly unfolded.

The murder victim might have escaped had he recognised the presence of Danielle’s ex-husband Emil shadowing her constantly as a red flag but he had no reason to be suspicious. He cannot be blamed for accepting Danielle’s explanation at face value. Like so much in this story the ex-husband is not what he seems to be.

Grace’s newspaper hires a private detective to help her out and he provides some amusement. There are in fact some very funny moments in this film, which help De Palma to unsettle us just a little more.

De Palma is doing more than homaging scenes from Hitchcock movies. He’s exploring territory that Hitchcock explored in numerous movies - questions of identity and reality. Things, and people, are not what they seem to be.

Split screen, a technique very rarely seen today, had been used lots of time before but no-one has ever used it more cleverly than De Palma. He doesn’t just use it in an obvious way to show us the action from two points of view he also uses it to show us different actions occurring simultaneously which ramps up the suspense and accelerates the pacing.

This starts as a suspense thriller but will become a very creepy horror movie. And it’s a woman-in-peril movie with a real twist.

For all its twists and perversities and its over-the-top ending the plot of Sisters hangs together surprisingly well.

There is some body horror (De Palma being a bit Cronenbergian before Cronenberg) but he’s more interested in the psychological mutilation inflicted on the sisters.

De Palma’s pacing is faultless and given that this was his first major foray into this territory his mastery of the techniques of suspense is impressive. And De Palma demonstrates his ability to be clever without being gimmicky.

William Finlay as Emil is creepily enigmatic and Charles Durning as the private eye is quite fun but the acting performance that matters is that of Margot Kidder and she’s excellent - very sweet and very scary.

To make it all even more Hitchcockian Bernard Herrmann did the music.

Sisters might be De Palma’s first real movie but it is a real De Palma movie and a very good one with his personal signature very much in evidence. Highly recommended.

The Criterion Blu-Ray looks OK. 

Possession (1981)

Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession starts on a note of hysteria and the hysteria level rises steadily. All of the characters exist in a constant state of hysteria.

This is not an overly coherent movie. There are ideas that seem to be just thrown in for the hell of it and are not followed through. At the start of the movie Mark (Sam Neill) is apparently an intelligence agent who has just returned from a lengthy mission. We see a glimpse of the Berlin Wall so we know we’re in Berlin, therefore we assume he was undercover behind the Iron Curtain. This is potentially an intriguing angle for a horror movie to explore - spies exist in a world of deception where nobody is what he appears to be. But we hear no more about Mark’s job as a spy. It’s as if the writers just totally forgot about it. This is all too typical of this movie.

Mark is married to Anna (Isabelle Adjani) and they have a small son, Bob.Their marriage is falling apart. He suspects that she has been unfaithful. We don’t really know what led up to this or how long the marriage has been rocky. We never do find out.

They both give the impression of being deranged babbling lunatics.

Mark finally discovers that Anna has been having an affair with Heinrich. Mark goes nuts, but he goes nuts about everything. Mark confronts Heinrich, and that doesn’t go well.

And then Mark discovers that Heinrich is not his only rival. And his other rival is much stranger.

We get lots more shouting and lots more histrionics. Then we see the monster. Then there are lots of gross-out scenes. When the monster appears the pacing, which was slow enough to begin with, becomes positively glacial. Something is going to happen connected with the monster but it takes forever to happen. And there will be further developments in the marital drama between Mark and Anna, and that takes forever to resolve.

In the meantime Mark has become involved with Helen. Helen is Bob’s schoolteacher. Helen is also played by Isabelle Adjani. It’s like Anna and Helen are two sides of the same woman, with Anna being the bad girl and Helen being the good girl. Maybe each of us has a good side and a bad side. Maybe that explains everything about the human condition. It’s a struggle between good and evil. Pretty deep stuff. We’re talking philosophy here man.

There’s a sub-plot involving a private eye, which also drags. And eventually we get to the infamous tentacle sex scene. Which is as un-erotic as the rest of the movie.

And what does it all mean in the end? I haven’t the remotest idea. That’s not necessarily a flaw. Some of my favourite movies are those that leave the audience wondering what on earth has actually been going on, and wondering what it all meant.

If that sort of thing is done well then you’re left wanting to see the movie again in the hope of teasing out a bit more of the meaning. You’re left perplexed but fascinated. If it’s done badly, you end up simply not caring that nothing made sense. And that, alas, was my response to this movie.

Both Sam Neill (a very fine actor) and Isabelle Adjani give performances that are somewhat incoherent and histrionic.

The performances are totally insane right from the start. We don’t get to see a gradual descent into madness, which might have been interesting. So we don’t get to know them as people. We never see them as anything other than crazed nutters. We have no idea what made Mark tick before he went crazy because we only see him as a crazy person. We have no idea what made Anna tick before she became a psycho because we only see her as a psycho. We do see Mark become more and more unhinged and we do see him descend into complete madness but I think it’s a weakness of the film that he’s already unstable right from the beginning. His descent into madness doesn’t really surprise us. He seems like the sort of guy who is already close to cracking up.

There’s also no gradual build-up as things get progressively stranger. Even when nothing strange at all is happening everyone is shouting hysterically and throwing things. So when strange things do start to happen the impact is lost. These are people who would put their fists through the kitchen wall if they burnt the toast.

Watching strange crazy things happening to strange crazy people isn’t that interesting. It’s what you expect to see happening to such people. It has no shock value. It’s a lot more interesting to see strange crazy things happening to relatively normal, or at least relatively sane, people.

This is what happens when you get a non-horror director trying to make a horror movie. They don’t understand the genre and they make a mess of things.

I loved crazy messed-up trippy weird movies. I love movies that are surreal and disturbing. I even love movies that combine horror with artiness. But just because a movie is crazy and messed-up and trippy and weird and has arty pretensions doesn’t make it a good movie. I don’t think Possession is a particularly good movie of this type.

If you’re going to make a weird movie you have to choose a particular kind of weirdness and stick to it. Even if the viewers never do figure out what is really happening and what it all means they have to at least feel that all the weirdness they’ve seen was in some way connected.

Listening to the audio commentary by the director it’s obvious that this was a very personal film for him. I can’t help thinking it was just too personal. It’s all based on the break-up of a relationship which happened to him, and all the characters are based on real people who were involved in that event. The result is that the movie is packed with minor details that have a deep personal significance for Zulawski, but which are not going to have any significance for the viewer. There are lots of things that make vague sense when he explains them, but when the director has to explain what various things in his movie mean then to me that is bad film-making.

As a horror movie I think Possession fails. It isn’t scary and it isn’t horrifying and it isn’t creepy. There are moments that are disgustingly gross but genuine creepiness requires more than grossness. I suspect that Zulawski thought he was adding a fairytale element to his domestic melodrama but I can’t see that it serves much purpose.

But I don’t think Zulawski had any intention of making a horror movie as such. It’s a story of personality disintegration (made literal in the doubling of Anna and Helen) and the monster is merely some kind of metaphor.

I didn’t like this movie at all but in fairness I should point out that almost everybody disagrees with me on this!

Innocent Blood (1992)

1992 was, unexpectedly, an interesting year for vampire movies. There was Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula and John Landis’s Innocent Blood. Two very very different movies but both stylish and daring and breathing new life into an old genre. Coppola’s Dracula is insanely romantic. Innocent Blood is an erotic horror black comedy. It’s also a hardboiled gangster movie. There’s a lot going on!

Horror comedies were nothing new but they had invariably been goofy and innocuous and had relied on broad comedy and even slapstick. They had been very kiddie-friendly. Innocent Blood isn’t the least bit kiddie-friendly. This is not family entertainment. This is blood-drenched full-on horror but combined with sophisticated witty black comedy and vampire sex.

Marie (Anne Parillaud) is a cute French lady vampire finding life in the big city in the U.S. to be a bit of a challenge. She hasn’t fed for quite a while and she’s very hungry. She’s also sex-starved.

Marie has solved the ethical problems posed by vampirism in a rather neat way. She does not drink innocent blood. Her victims are very bad people and by killing them she’s doing society a service as well as feeding herself. It’s a win-win!

At the moment she has turned her attention to a syndicate of mobsters. Specifically, the mob led by Sal Macelli (Robert Loggia). These are very hard very violent men but they’re no match for a vampire.

Joe Gennaro (Anthony LaPaglia) is an undercover cop who has infiltrated Sal Macelli’s organisation but now everything is out of control and his cover is blown. And Macelli is dead anyway.

Macelli is dead but he’s now a vampire. He’s even nastier as a vampire than he was as a gangster and he has plans to lead a vampire mob that will control the city.

In the midst of all this chaos Gennaro finds an unlikely ally. She’s an odd but cute French girl named Marie. He thinks she’s a murderess. It takes him a while to get used to the idea that she’s a vampire. And it takes him even longer to realise that they are going to have to be allies. Gennaro is no match for a bunch of vampiric hoodlums but Marie is not just a vampire, she’s an old vampire. She’s more powerful than Macelli and she knows how the whole vampire thing works. She knows the weaknesses of vampires.

Gennaro and Marie are not sure that they can trust each other but the sex is really really great and after a good old steamy bedroom romp they decide they can be friends.

Much mayhem follows.

Surprisingly all the disparate elements in this movie come together effectively. This is full-blown horror with plenty of violence and gore. It’s a tough violent gangland tale. There’s some inspired black comedy but Landis is careful never to cross the line into goofiness. And this movie is never camp. There’s plenty of erotic heat. There’s an offbeat love story. But these elements are kept in perfect balance. Landis knows what he’s doing and he’s in complete control.

The acting is generally very good. It’s fun to see Don Rickles as a crooked lawyer - he’s amusing but it’s not an out-and-out comic performance. Robert Loggia goes way over the top as Macelli but that’s the right way to play it and he’s truly scary.

Obviously this movie was always going to stand or fall on Anne Parillaud’s performance and she turns out to be an inspired casting choice. Her French accent makes her seem exotic and an outsider. You don’t want a vampire with a Brooklyn accent - that would lead to goofiness. Anne Parillaud makes her lady vampire suitably enigmatic. Parillaud is beautiful but not conventionally pretty - she doesn’t have a Barbie doll look. She looks like a sexy dangerous lady vampire. This movie came out the same year as her star-making turn in the superb La Femme Nikita (1990).

One thing I like is that although Marie has her ethical inhibition about not taking innocent blood she doesn’t indulge in a whole lot of angsting about it. She’s sincere, but she doesn’t revel in moral grandstanding. And while that aspect could have made it into a species of vigilante killer movie that aspect is not pushed too far. Marie is a vampire, not a cop or a social worker.

The practical effects are done well. There’s enough gore to satisfy those who like that sort of thing. Landis keeps things moving along (I don’t agree with those who think this movie is too slow). There’s some sex and quite a bit of nudity.

A lot of people disliked this movie. I suspect that those who were unaware that the vampire movie had moved on and had been comprehensively reinvented during the 70s and that the traditional elements of vampire lore had long since been consigned to the dustbin disliked the movie because those traditional elements are lacking here. No crucifixes. No wooden stakes through the heart. No vampires sleeping in coffins. What’s great is that Innocent Blood is not only a non-traditional vampire movie, it doesn’t try to ape the revolutionary vampire movies of the 70s like Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos, Jose Larraz’s Vampyres or Jean Rollin’s Lips of Blood. It’s its own thing.

Innocent Blood is hugely entertaining and original. A great vampire film. Very highly recommended.

Landis was going for a visually dark shadowy look and thankfully the Warner Archive Blu-Ray retains this.

Wolfen (1981)

Wolfen (1981) is a horror movie based on Whitley Strieber’s 1978 novel The Wolfen.

You’re probably going to assume that this will be a werewolf tale. It certainly has some affinities with the werewolf genre. Just as he took a very unconventional approach to the vampire genre in his 1981 novel The Hunger Strieber took an equally unconventional approach to the werewolf genre in The Wolfen. Not everybody likes Strieber’s fiction but I’m a big fan.

And the movie Wolfen is a long way from being a routine werewolf story. Some major plot changes were made but the clever central idea is retained.

A billionaire industrialist and his wife are murdered in Manhattan. Not so much murdered as butchered. They were under constant surveillance by an ultra high tech security and surveillance company but it didn’t help them.

Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) is a police detective who has been slowly putting himself back together after a crack-up. He has a reputation for being a bit odd but for getting results.

The favoured theory is that this double murder was an act of terrorism. Dewey finds himself with a partner, counter-terrorism expert Detective Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora). Dewey doesn’t really buy the terrorism theory but he’s happy enough to work with Rebecca. She’s a good cop and she’s easy to get on with.

There are a couple of slightly puzzling things about the murders. And then a body, badly butchered, is found in the South Bronx. There is one very surprising common element. Two hairs. The hairs are not human.

From the title of the movie the viewer will guess that wolves of some kind are involved, but are they werewolves or actual wolves? Could it be a psycho with a wolf obsession? Or an elaborate attempt to mislead the police? But until a very late stage Dewey and Rebecca have no idea what they’re dealing with.

Although it takes a long time for Dewey to get on the right track this is not a slow-moving film. Right from the start there are graphic murders, and gore. But they’re filmed in such a way as to ensure that we don’t see what is really happening. Which is as it should be. This movie relies to a huge degree on an atmosphere of spookiness and weirdness. The fact that we don’t know what’s going on makes it all much more unsettling.

There are so many things that I love about this movie. And so many things that I intensely dislike. I love the urban devastation - this is like a city being consumed by a wasting disease. I love the slow reveal of the truth. I love the optical effects which really do make us feel that we’re seeing many of these sequences through the eyes of someone or some thing definitely not human. These sequences really are spooky and menacing. I love the central premise.

Unfortunately director/co-writer Michael Wadleigh added some additional elements to the story and these additions are not just tedious, they seriously undermine the central premise. The political subplots is not too much of a problem. It adds an interesting red herring for the cops to deal with and it’s not intrusive. The hippie-dippie mystical stuff is however a major problem. The movie would have been a whole lot better with all that stuff cut.

There’s also a particular point about the nature of the killers which is stressed in the book but somewhat overlooked in the movie, and this does lessen the impact a little.

These things are annoying but happily they don’t quite succeed in sinking the movie. There are still the cool visuals and the weird menacing atmosphere and some great suspense and some genuinely very good ideas.

Albert Finney is pretty good. He wisely doesn’t try to make Dewey too eccentric or too odd. It’s an effective restrained performance. Diane Venora is a reasonably likeable female lead.

Wolfen has some major flaws but it’s sufficiently interesting and unusual to still be very much worth seeing. It remains one of the most intriguing horror movies of the 80s. In spite of those flaws, highly recommended.

The Warner Archive Blu-Ray is barebones but looks great.

I’ve also reviewed the Whitley Strieber novel, The Wolfen.

Count Yorga, Vampire (1970)

Count Yorga, Vampire had quite a cult following at one time. It’s a “vampires in the modern world” movie. I saw it years ago and was decidedly unimpressed. It’s now time for a rewatch on Blu-Ray.

The movie opens with a séance conducted by the mysterious Count Yorga (Robert Quarry). The object is to contact the spirit of the mother of Donna (Donna Anderson). The mother had been Count Yorga’s girlfriend. Donna’s friends are very sceptical about the séance but Donna believes.

Donna is now under the Count’s hypnotic control.

Paul (Michael Murphy) and Erica (Judy Lang) have an encounter with the Count.

Erica is not well. Her physician Dr Jim Hayes (Roger Perry) diagnoses pernicious anaemia.

Dr Hayes is a blood specialist. He immediately suspects vampirism.

Dr Hayes persuades Donna’s friends that Count Yorga is a vampire who must be destroyed.

Unfortunately they turn out to be less than skilful vampire hunters. They equip themselves with sharpened broomsticks and crude improvised wooden crosses.

They do not inspire confidence.

They don’t know if they’re up against a single vampire. They do know that they will have to deal with the Count’s manservant/bodyguard who looks like a mad scientist’s assistant. We expect him to be named Igor but in fact he’s named Brudah (Edward Walsh). He’s dumb but he’s scary.

The stage is set for a showdown between the vampire and the amateur vampire hunters.

Count Yorga’s lair in his mansion looks reasonably impressive. It really is a great location which is utilised to the fullest.

The vampire makeup effects are adequate. There’s some gore but it’s fairly tame.

The visuals overall are OK but not exactly inspired.

This is a very low-budget movie and it does look rather on the cheap side.

This an extraordinarily un-erotic vampire movie and if you’re making an un-erotic vampire movie you’re pretty much missing the point of the whole vampire mythos. Intriguingly this movie was apparently originally intended to be a softcore erotic vampire film which might have been rather more entertaining.

Robert Quarry makes a moderately good vampire but doesn’t quite have the charisma that actors like Christopher Lee and Louis Jourdan brought to the role.

The other performances are adequate but unexciting.

This was an exciting time in the history of the vampire movie. European directors were totally redefining the genre with moves like Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos (1970), Jean Rollin’s Requiem for a Vampire (1971) and The Nude Vampire (1970), José Larraz’s Vampyres (1974) and the underrated Paul Naschy vampire flick Count Dracula’s Great Love (1973). The Japanese were getting into the act as well, with The Vampire Doll (1970).

By comparison Count Yorga, Vampire seems old-fashioned, stodgy and clunky. It is in fact just another (unauthorised) retread of Dracula but with the action moved to 1970 California. The Count has been renamed, he comes from Bulgaria rather than Transylvania and a blood specialist takes the place of Van Helsing but it’s the exact same story.

This was of course the same approach that Hammer took with Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), relocating Dracula to early 70s Swinging London. But the Hammer film is more professionally made, it has more style, it’s more fun, it has Christopher Lee and it at least tries to take advantage of the idea of an ancient vampire suddenly finding himself in a world of rock’n’roll, miniskirts, flared jeans, sexual promiscuity and mind-altering substances.

Count Yorga, Vampire simply does not take any advantage of its contemporary setting.

This is not by any means a bad movie. It’s just that if you want a fairly straightforward Dracula adaptation then Hammer’s Horror of Dracula is superior and if you want a “Dracula in the modern world” move than Hammer’s Dracula A.D. 1972 does it better and in both cases Christopher Lee is a much better Dracula than Robert Quarry. Count Yorga, Vampire really doesn’t offer anything special. Worth a look but set your expectations fairly low.

The Sentinel (1977)

The Sentinel is a 1977 supernatural horror/occult thriller movie written and directed by Michael Winner. Or at least it might be supernatural horror, or it might not be.

I’m going to lay my cards on the table right at the start. I don’t care what anyone says I like Michael Winner as a director.

We start with a bunch of Catholic priests in Italy and they seem to be very concerned not just about evil in general but about some specific manifestation of evil.

Then the scene shifts to New York. Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) is a successful model. Her lawyer boyfriend Michael (Chris Sarandon) wants to marry her. They’ve been living together for two years. Alison says she needs space. She wants her own apartment.

She is troubled by a bizarre childhood memory. It involves her father, and possibly satanic influences.

She finds a nice apartment. Maybe she should have been suspicious when she found out that such a nice apartment was available for such a low rental but the real estate agent, Miss Logan (Ava Gardner), seems very reassuring.

Some of her new neighbours are a bit odd. Charles Chazen (Burgess Meredith) is a crazy old guy who lives with his cat and his parakeet but he’s very sweet and very friendly.

The two lesbians are more worrying. And the twins. Even fact all of the neighbours are worrying in various ways.

The noises from upstairs are disturbing.

Alison really starts to worry after she asks Miss Logan about the neighbours.

We might wonder a bit about that disturbing childhood memory. Is it a real memory? Could it be a false memory? Or just a dream? Or even a demonically inspired dream? Or is she remembering things that she misinterpreted at the time?

This is a “supernatural evil in the modern world” movie. But this is one of those movies that may or may not be actually about supernatural horror. Everything we see could have non-supernatural explanations. Somebody could be gaslighting Alison. Or Alison may in fact be crazy. That’s a possibility that will occur to us, and it occurs to Alison as well.

Alison goes to investigate those noises upstairs and she thinks she kills an old man. It might be her father. But her father died several weeks earlier. And the only blood the police find is Alison’s blood.

Detective Gatz (Eli Wallach) is worried by several things, principally by a case a few years earlier. A case that could have a link to these recent events.

Winner cleverly keeps things mysterious. He offers us nothing substantial that would back any of the theories we might have come up with to explain what is going on. He slowly builds an atmosphere of menace and paranoia but keeps it vague, which of course makes it all the more unsettling.

Alison is a really nice girl. She might be a really nice sane girl, or a really mad girl. Other characters are ambiguous as well.

And there’s still that niggling suspicion that supernatural evil might be at work.

I’m being deliberately very vague because I think this is a movie you’ll appreciate a lot more if you go into it not knowing what kind of movie it’s going to turn out to be.

Burgess Meredith gives the most memorable performance but all the cast members are fine. John Carradine is quite something as well. Cristina Raines and Chris Sarandon are effectively ambiguous. Look out for Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum in small roles.

The unease mounts remorselessly. The ending really is worth the wait. This is a movie that delivers the goods. Highly recommended.

The Universal Blu-Ray is barebones but looks good.

Carrie (1976)

I saw Brian De Palma’s Carrie many years ago and hated it. I saw it again a few years later and still hated it. But here I am watching it again.

There’s no doubt that much of my dislike for the film stems from my intense dislike of Stephen King’s books. The one Stephen King adaptation I truly love is The Shining and that’s because it’s much more Kubrick than King. As far as I’m concerned the less of Stephen King there is in a Stephen King adaptation the better.

The first thing that strikes the viewer about this movie is the overwhelming all-pervasive femaleness. That tone is set right at the start with the infamous shower scene. While some feminist critics got sniffy about the copious quantities of female frontal nudity that abundant unselfconscious casual nudity serves to establish the overwhelming atmosphere of femaleness. This is the world of women. It is a world entirely separate from the world of men. The girls’ locker room is like a pagan temple reserved entirely for priestesses and female acolytes. Or a meeting of a coven of witches, with the witches all sky-clad. The casual relaxed nudity serves to emphasise the exclusion of men from this world.

This world of women has its own rules and its own rituals. It has its own stages of initiation. Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is about to experience one of those rites-of-passage.

Carrie’s first period has just started. She is terrified. Her mother had not told her abut such things. Carrie is mercilessly mocked by the other girls. This is a normal female rite-of-passage and the fact that Carrie was not prepared for it marks her as an outsider. Acceptance in this world of women depends on having a proper knowledge of the various rituals. This women’s world is a world of rules and codes of behaviour enforced by other women.

Carrie is ruthlessly persecuted by the school’s Mean Girls. One of the girls, Sue (Amy Irving), who isn’t really a Mean Girl, comes up with a plan. She will persuade her boyfriend Tommy Ross (William Katt) to take Carrie to the Prom. As it happens Tommy is a major heartthrob. Sue’s motives are, surprisingly, well-intentioned. She and Tommy really are trying to help Carrie to come out of her shell. Their plan would have worked but for the evil machinations of Chief Mean Girl and Uber-Bitch Chris Hargenson (Nancy Allen) and her sleazy boyfriend Billy Nolan (John Travolta). The Prom ends up not just in disaster but a bloodbath.

Carrie has a gift. Telekinesis. At first her gift is inly moderately destructive but the more upset Carrie becomes the more destructive her power becomes.

There are so many interesting and surprising aspects to this movie. This is entirely a woman-centric movie but it’s not a feminist movie - it has no ideological axe to grind. Carrie’s problems are not caused by the patriarchy. There is no sign of a patriarchy in this movie. Carrie’s problems are caused by the Matriarchy - the world of women in which women enforce the rules on other women. Men play no part whatsoever in this world.

There are only three male characters and only one is significant. That’s Tommy Ross, and he’s a really nice guy. Billy Nolan is a swine. The high school principal is well-meaning but ludicrously out of his depth dealing with Carrie’s very female problems. Tommy Ross represents healthy masculinity. He has so much self-confident masculinity that he has no problems being sensitive and gentle toward women. At no point does Tommy need to do anything to assert his masculinity. It’s just there.

We are half-expecting the plan cooked up by Sue and Tommy to turn out to be a cruel joke on Carrie but it isn’t. Tommy really is trying to help Carrie. She’s at the point in her life when a girl needs to negotiate several rites-of-passage - her first kiss, her first dance, being told by a man for the first time that she’s pretty. Tommy really is trying to guide her gently through these steps. And he has no intention of sleeping with her. He knows she’s not ready for that step. He is not manipulating her. Carrie isn’t stupid. She knows Tommy is not in love with her and that he doesn’t want her to be his regular girlfriend. Tommy knows that Carrie is not stupid. He knows that she knows these things. He is just offering her an evening that will be a beautiful memory for her, and a stage on her way to becoming a grown-up woman.

And it all works. So that when disaster strikes the tragedy takes on an epic quality. Carrie had made it through. Almost.

The relationship between Carrie and her mother is something I have mixed feelings about. The idea of her mother’s fundamentalist Christianity blighting her daughter’s life is trite and heavy-handed and seems out of place in a movie that otherwise avoids the obvious.

It is significant that despite frantic efforts Carrie’s mother Margaret has failed to suppress Carrie’s sexuality and her awareness of her own womanhood. When we see Carrie in the shower in the opening she is experiencing a very innocent sensual enjoyment of her womanness. Carrie is not afraid of the femaleness of her body. She enjoys, in an entirely non-sexual way, caressing her breasts and thighs.

In a later scene her mother expresses her horror of women’s breasts. To Margaret they are symbols of sin. But Carrie is proud of her breasts. She is a woman. Women have breasts. Carrie likes having a woman’s body.

It’s interesting that Carrie is not destroyed by her mother. By the time of the Prom Carrie has already triumphed. She has put on her glamorous prom dress, she has gone to the Prom with the hottest boy in school, she has allowed him to kiss her, she has danced, she has been romanced (in an innocent but enjoyable way), she has learnt to be confident about being a woman, she is ready to enter the grown-up female world. She has won the battle, and the war.

It is not her mother who destroys her, but a teenaged girl. Mean Girls are more formidable enemies than mothers. Carrie’s mother is not the villainess here. The villainess is Mean Girl Chris Hargenson. Nothing is more terrifying than a teenaged girl setting out to destroy another teenaged girl.

I liked Carrie much much more this time. There’s so much to admire in De Palma’s technique. I love the way everything is shot in a way that emphasises that we have entered a world of femaleness. I love the way this movie so often defies out expectations.

I liked Sissy Spacek and I liked Amy Irving as Sue. Nancy Allen is deliciously evil as Chris. I still don’t like Piper Laurie’s caricature of a performance.

This is still not my favourite De Palma movie but it is a remarkable movie that is much much more than the trashy gorefest it seems to be on the surface. Highly recommended.

Carrie is one of the handful of movies that explore the nightmare world of teenaged girls. The other truly great movie of this type, although it approaches the subject very differently, is of course Heathers (1989).

The Exorcist III (1990)

Exorcist III is the third movie in the series and the story behind the movie is more complicated than the movie.

Willian Peter Blatty, author of the original 1971 novel The Exorcist and screenwriter of the original 1973 The Exorcist movie, wrote a screenplay for a third movie. The production company, Morgan Creek, wanted changes. Eventually a screenplay more or less acceptable to both parties took shape but with a major dispute regarding the ending. Several directors were considered before Blatty decided to direct the movie himself.

After a less than successful preview Morgan Creek ordered extensive reshoots including an exorcism scene. Blatty reluctantly did the reshoots. Blatty remained very unhappy about the exorcism scene. He saw the movie as a story linked to the original story, but not an exorcism movie.

Blatty turned the original version into a very successful novel, Legion. He had always wanted Legion as the title of the movie rather than Exorcist III.

Years later Blatty’s original cut was restored (with the title Legion) using VHS footage in Blatty’s personal possession. Both the Shout! Factory and Arrow Blu-Rays include this Legion “director’s cut” as an extra so it’s possible to see the movie Blatty had wanted to make, which differs in a number of ways from the Exorcist III theatrical cut.

Lieutenant Kinderman (George C. Scott) is investigating a series of horrific murders that remind him eerily of the Gemini Killer murders, but the Gemini Killer is dead. Kinderman expresses his fears to his old buddy Father Dyer (Ed Flanders).

Much of the film takes place in the psychiatric ward of a hospital. A man known only as Patient X claims to be the Gemini Killer.

What is actually going on remains mysterious until the ending, and perhaps even after that. Patient X cannot leave his cell. He cannot be carrying out the new murders. Or can he? This is not just a series of copycat killings. Both the killer and Patient X know things about the Gemini killings that the police have never revealed.

Kinderman is a rationalist. He resists the idea that there could be anything supernatural going on here. He knows that there are things happening that are difficult to explain in any other way, but he still resists.

The plot is complicated. It involves several dead people. Not just the Gemini Killer, but also Father Damien Karris. Kinderman knows these people are dead.

It seems to have been Blatty’s intention to tell a story connected to the events in The Exorcist, and involving some of the same people, but that would not be a sequel in the usual sense. Of course his difficulty is that Morgan Creek wanted it to be a sequel in a much more straightforward sense.

There are grisly murders but they take place offscreen. This is a cerebral slow-burn horror film, until the grand guignol ending (which Blatty vehemently did not want). This is very much theological horror. I wouldn’t say that you have to be a Catholic to appreciate this film but you do need at least a vague knowledge of the basics of Catholic theology. There’s a clever well-executed dream sequence but unless you’re aware of the Catholic concept of Purgatory you’ll misunderstand it completely.

This also seems to have caused tensions between Blatty and the execs at Morgan Creeks who wanted more overt horror content.

The most significant and obvious difference Blatty’s version and the theatrical cut is the exorcism scene which is entirely absent from Blatty’s cut. Blatty was correct to feel that that scene was entirely unnecessary and damaged the film. On the other hand one can see Morgan Creek’s point of view - without that scene it’s a very talky film with very little overt horror.

The movie did poorly at the box office but whichever version had been released it would probably have done poorly. It’s an intellectual theological horror film in which the characters endlessly discuss theological questions. That doesn’t make it a bad movie, but it does make it a movie with limited commercial appeal.

Exorcist III/Legion is interesting but I have to say that it didn’t particularly grab me. But then I’m not much of a fan of The Exorcist either. I’m one of those weird crazy people who think Exorcist II: The Heretic is a masterpiece.

Exorcist III looks good on Blu-Ray. When you Blatty’s version Legion you do have to accept that the VHS-sourced inserts are VHS quality but Blatty’s version is still worth watching.

Scissors (1991)

In 1992 Sharon Stone became, overnight, the hottest property in Hollywood thanks to Basic Instinct. She seemed set for a glittering career, which didn’t happen to the extent one would have expected. She made some interesting movies in the 90s but apart from Basic Instinct they were not loved by the critics. Scissors, made a year before Basic Instinct, is one those critically unloved movies. Some of these movies were in fact very very good but once the critics turn against you there’s not much you can do.

Perhaps the problem is that some of her most notable 90s movies were about sex. They were to varying extent erotic thrillers. That always makes mainstream critics nervous, and often brings out their natural snarkiness. They do not entirely approve of erotic thrillers.

Scissors starts off very promisingly, creating unease on several different levels. Angie Anderson (Sharon Stone) almost gets raped in the elevator of her apartment building. That’s obviously unsettling to the viewer but there are other things vey early on that unsettle us. When we first see Angie she is dressed a bit oddly. She is dressed shabbily but we find out that she is not poor. She looks a bit like a refugee from the Summer of Love.

She collects dolls. There’s nothing inherently abnormal about a grown woman collecting dolls. It’s a not uncommon feminine hobby. But Angie seems to be obsessive about it. The dolls sleep on her bed. She sleeps on the couch. We see her looking at her naked breasts in the mirror and she does so in such a way to suggest that she’s a woman not quite comfortable in her own skin, and perhaps not quite comfortable with her sexuality.

She is rescued from the attempted rape by another tenant, Alex Morgan (Steve Railsback). He’s an actor. He shares an apartment with his wheelchair-bound brother Cole. They both seem a bit too tightly wrapped. Not overtly creepy, but just a tiny bit unsettling.

Then we find out that Angie is a virgin. Not by choice but through fear.

Cole Morgan is a painter. One look at his paintings is enough to convince us that he has a few issues with women. Then he shows Angie one particularly painting. She’s disturbed, and so are we.

So we have all sorts of disturbing provocative elements and what’s nice is that we know they’re important but we can’t yet see exactly how they’re going to fit together.

There are other characters who are also perhaps a little ambiguous. There’s Alex’s bitter ex-girlfriend Nancy Leahy (Vicki Frederick). There’s her psychiatrist, Dr Carter (Ronny Cox). Angie might have a slight emotional fixation on him. There’s Dr Carter’s ambitious politician wife.

And then there’s Billy (who might be someone from her childhood), and Richard Bailey (her new employer). There’s mystery surrounding both of them.

Angie sees her attacker again. Or she thinks she does.

This is a subjective movie. We see things from Angie’s point of view, and maybe her judgments are not always reliable. And her sexual hangups can cause her judgments about men to be dubious.

Then things get really strange. Now Angie is in real trouble.

This is not a Hitchcock-style suspense movie. Hitchcock always maintained that suspense is achieved by giving the audience information that the protagonist doesn’t have. In Scissors by contrast we only know what Angie knows. It’s more of a mystery thriller.

The production design is superb.

Steve Railsback handles his dual role rather well. I loved Sharon Stone in what was a very demanding role. She has to keep us guessing about this woman. The other performers are fine but this is a movie that is going to stand or fall depending entirely on Sharon Stone’s performance and she delivers the goods.

This is an erotic thriller in the sense that sex does to a large extent drive the plot and provider the character motivations but there are no sex scenes and only one brief topless scene. The violence (and there’s not much of it) is similarly mostly implied. There are no geysers of blood in this movie.

What it does have is a very disturbing atmosphere and most all a nice sense of uncertainty about whether we’re seeing reality or Angie’s distorted view of reality, or possibly there are things that exist only in her mind. Those questions are left unresolved up to the end. And the ending is very neat. I like this ending a lot. This is a very underrated movie and it’s highly recommended. And it looks great on Blu-Ray.

I’ve also reviewed Sharon Stone’s other much-maligned and very underrated 1993 erotic thriller Sliver.

Human Beasts (1980)

Human Beasts (El carnaval de las bestias) is a 1980 Spanish-Japanese co-production written and directed by Paul Nashy. Naschy of course also stars.

It starts off giving all the appearances of being a violent action thriller (other elements including full-bore horror will pop up later). Naschy plays Bruno Rivera, a hitman and former mercenary who is employed by a Japanese terrorist group to steal some diamonds. Bruno double-crosses them. The terrorists hunt him down. He’s alone and there are five of them, but he is a ruthless professional and they’re amateurs. He wins the fight, but ends up grievously wounded.

His problem is that one of the terrorists is still alive and she’s out for revenge. Mieko (Eiko Nagashima) was madly in love with Bruno. She thought he was going to marry her. Now she has a whole bunch of very good reasons to hate him, the fact that he killed her brother being the main one, and when a woman after revenge is also a woman scorned you figure that the revenge she has in mind is quite nasty.

She is also a fanatic.

Bruno, near death, is taken in by Don Simón (Lautaro Murúa) and his family.

Don Simón is a doctor. This is where the movie changes gears a bit. It gets weirder and more twisted and more perverse. The household comprises Don Simón, his daughters Mónica (Silvia Aguilar) and Alicia (Azucena Hernández) and a black servant named Raquel (Roxana Dupre). At least we assume at first that she’s a servant, and then we discover that she is Don Simón’s mistress. They have a passionate and apparently mutually satisfying sadomasochistic relationship. Raquel enjoys being punished.

The two daughters are almost scratching each other’s eyes out for the chance to be the first to get Bruno’s trousers off. Mónica wins that battle. Bruno is still very weak but he still manages to pleasure Mónica very successfully, while Alicia seethes with jealousy.

Apart from the rampant sexual perversity there are other odd things about Don Simón’s household. Apparently they have very tight security. Why would a simple country doctor and pig farmer need tight security?

It might begin as an action thriller but it defies easy genre categorisation. There’s the woman-seeking-revenge element. There’s also a man seeking redemption. Bruno has been a very bad man but now he has discovered he has a conscience and he has regrets. Whether such a man can achieve redemption, and self-forgiveness, is another matter. He has terrible nightmares.

And then there’s the ghost.

There are flashbacks aplenty and dream sequences. Past and present bleed into each other. Reality and dream bleed into each other. The viewer can’t be sure what’s real and what isn’t and nor can Bruno.

And then comes the totally wild ending. It’s foreshadowed but it’s so outrageous you’ll be taken by surprise anyway.

Naschy is in good form, doing a fairly good job of making Bruno’s change of heart seem convincing. Eiko Nagashima makes an excellent driven woman. The supporting players are all fine.

This was a fairly early directorial effort by Naschy but he handles things very competently. And his screenplay is pleasingly outré.

There’s a bit of sleaze and some definitely visceral horror.

Human Beasts is a bit of an oddity but it’s interesting and disturbing and generally quite impressive. Highly recommended.

This film is included in Shout! Factory’s Paul Naschy Collection I Blu-Ray boxed set. The transfer is very good. There are no extras of note.