Vault of Horror (1973)

Vault of Horror was not exactly a sequel to Amicus’s successful Tales from the Crypt, more of a follow-up employing the same formula. Five brief tales of horror inspired by the 1950s Tales from the Crypt comics, linked by a framing story.

The problem I have with this one is the same as I had with Tales from the Crypt - the stories are just too compressed to allow for much in the way of plot twists, and what plot twists the stories do contain are a little too obvious.

The first story is particularly weak. The second, involving a new bride’s attempts to deal with her husband’s organising and neatness fetish, is better. The third is better still - a magician travelling in India ruins an Indian’s magician act by revealing the workings of the trick to the crowd. Later he becomes obsessed by another trick he sees performed, an illusion so realistic he is unable to even guess as to how it’s on. He is determined to get posession of the secret of the trick.

The fourth story about a man who fakes his own death is fairly predictable but executed with enough style to be highly entertaining. And the final story is a revenge story, as a painter who has been cheated by a cabal of art dealers and critics gains his vengeance in an unusual way. Maybe it just that I’m a sucker for stories involving voodoo, but I liked this one the most.

Tom Baker is delightful as the vengeful artist, and Curd Jürgens is wonderful as always as the unscrupulous illusionist. Terry-Thomas has great fun as the obsessively organised husband in the second tale.

Roy Ward Baker directs with his usual flair, and the end result is entertaining and amusing if not especially inspired or terrifying.

Blood and Roses (1960)

Roger Vadim is really remembered today for one movie, Barbarella. He is generally dismissed as a pretentious purveyor of softcore teasings masquerading as Art, and as a director who owed most of his success to the succession of extraordinary women with whom he both cohabited and made movies - Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda and Catherine Deneuve being the best-known.

This critical dismissal is actually a little unfair. Vadim made some genuinely interesting and off-best films, a personal favourite of mine being his 1973 offering Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman, which happened to be Bardot’s last movie. It’s not a complete success, but it’s odd and intriguing. It’s particularly unfortunate that Vadim’s masterpiece Blood and Roses (Et mourir de plaisir) is still not available on DVD, and is not available at all in an uncut version.

Made in 1960, it’s one of the countless movie adaptations of Sheridan le Fanu’s classic lesbian vampire novella Carmilla. The story is updated to a contemporary setting, which works perfectly well since Carmilla (or Mircalla), the last of the notorious Karnstein vampires, has gone through many incarnations and had many names since she began her undead existence. The idea that she would take possession of the body and soul of a recent female descendent of this infamous clan doesn’t really do any great violence to the spirit of le Fanu’s tale. The present-day Carmilla is in love with her cousin Leopold, who is about to marry. Her emotional turmoil, combined with an explosion in the family cemetery caused by a fireworks demonstration gone awry, gives the vampire Mircalla her chance to take over Carmilla’s life.

The movie has a lush dream-like and very romantic ambience. There are no orgies of blood-letting. Compared to Hammer's celebrated 1970 version of the story, The Vampire Lovers, Blood and Roses may seem slow, lacking in action and generally rather tame (although of course it’s likely that the uncut version is a lot sexier than the butchered version I saw) It relies on atmosphere, and the atmopsphere is conveyed effectively enough that it succeeds. It’s all repressed sexuality, thwarted desires and unspoken obsessions.

Any vampire movie has to have a scene involving a mirror, and this on actually manages to do something original and disturbing with the idea. There’s interesting use of colour, with scenes in which every hue but blood-red disappears from the movie’s colour palette. It’s a bit gimmicky, but it works. And the scene in which Carmilla kisses a spot of blood from the lip of her cousin’s bride-to-be is undeniably effective and subtly erotic. Annette Vadim (the director’s then-current wife) looks right for the part of Carmilla, and her performance is competent. Mel Ferrer and Elsa Martinelli are reasonably good in the roles of Carmilla’s cousin and his intended bride.

Whether you like this movie or not depends entirely on how much tolerance you have for arty European erotic horror. I have a lot of patience for this type of film, so I thoroughly enjoyed it. I still wish someone would release a proper uncut DVD version though. It deserves the sort of treatment that companies like Blue Underground and Mondo Macabro have given to so many neglected classics of Eurohorror.

Two Undercover Angels (1969)

The two Red Lips movies are Jess Franco at his most light-hearted. They’re comic book-style romps, all very tongue-in-cheek and rather silly, but fun. Two Undercover Angels (Rote Lippen, Sadisterotica) sees two glamorous girl private eyes investigating a series of disappearances of young women, which have some connection to a kinky artist.

The plot doesn’t hang together all that well, but it doesn’t really matter. Franco captures a comic book ambience pretty well (although he did the same thing much more effectively in The Girl from Rio, made at about the same time). The movie has a Pop Art kind of look, which fits in well with the themes of murder and art. Janine Reynaud and Rosanna Yanni are fun as the intrepid female private detectives.

Franco gets to work in a couple of his trademark surreal and erotic cabaret act scenes involving exotic female performers, and they’re the highlight of the movie. There are some other nice visual touches. The English dubbing is atrocious, although in some ways that just adds a bit more surreal atmosphere.

The folow-up, Kiss Me, Monster, is much crazier and for that reason more successful (Franco always being at his best when the weirdness level is at its height).

The Anchor Bay Region 2 DVD is a bit disappointing. The picture quality is OK but not as good as on some of the other superb Jess Franco DVDs that Anchor Bay have released. There are no extras apart from a few trailers. Definitely not in the top rank of Franco’s movies, but fun in a Swinging 60s kind of way if you’re in the mood.

The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960)

By the late 1950s Fritz Lang was finding his career as a Hollywood director both more difficult and less rewarding, and with the Hollywood system changing as the studio system declined he was finding it hard to adapt. So when German producer Artur Brauner tried to tempt him to return to Germany to direct Lang was more than willing to do so. He made his last three movies in Germany, the very last being The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse), made in 1960. This was more than just a return to the subject master of his early German movies (he’d made two films about the notorious super-criminal Dr Mabuse in the 20s and 30s). As much as I like Lang’s Hollywood movies (and I like them a good deal) I can’t help feeling that that The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse was also a return to the real Lang. Like the earlier Mabuse films it’s a mix of science fiction, spy movie and crime film and it makes fewer concession to realist cinema than his American films. It opens in stunning fashion, with a visually dazzling traffic scene involving the murder of a man in a car, intercut with scenes in police headquarters and scenes of a mysterious psychic predicting the murder. It’s disorienting and misleading, and it sets the tone for the whole movie. Nothing we see is really as it appears to be, the characters are not who we think they are, the relationships between people and events are not what we suppose them to be. We’ve entered a world of illusion, paranoia and conspiracy, and while Dr Mabuse speads his web of deceit over the characters in the movie Fritz Lang is entangling the viewer in a similar web of deceit. We’re presented with a wealthy handsome American hero, and we see him save the life of a unfortunate woman who has been drive to attempt suicide. We meet the detective chief, Kriminalkommissar Kras, the enigmatic blind clairvoyant Cornelius, the smooth-talking psychiatrist Dr Jordan, a buffooonish insurance salesman who rejoices in the name of Hieronymus B. Mistelzweig, the beautiful and tragic Marion Meril, and the sinister assassin known simply as Number 12. We gradually piece together the connections between these characters, but our assumptions are entirely wrong. And the assumptions the characters make about each other are equally mistaken. We know there is some very large-scale plot afoot, with international repercussions, and we (and Kriminalkommissar Kras) soon come to the conclusion that the shadowy presence of the evil Dr Mabuse is behind it all. The only problem with that theory is that Dr Mabuse has been dead for 30 years. But the touch of Dr Mabuse is unmistakeable. Most of the movie takes place in the luxurious Hotel Luxor in Berlin. This hotel was based on an actual hotel built by the Nazis during the war (not just built under the Nazi regime but actually built specifically for the purposes of the Gestapo). Lang had read about this hotel and had been fascinated by it, and it becomes a leading character in the movie in its own right (and it eventually offers the explanation for the title of the film). If the identities of the characters are shifting and misleading, their motivations are even more ambiguous, and even more questionable. The movie was a low-budget affair but Lang, relishing the freedom from the constraints under which he had always had to work in Hollywood, really lets himself go. It’s a bravura directing performance. The multi-national cast is composed of experienced and extremely competent performers, with Dawn Addams as Marion and Gert Fröbe as Kras especially good, while Howard Vernon (a very familiar face to fan of European cult movies) makes the most of his small role as Number 12. Karl Löb’s black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous. The DVD from Allday Entertainment, released through Image, is magnificent and packed with extras.Which is just as well - the film is so complex that you really need to listen to the commentary track and watch the featurette. This was Lang’s final masterpiece, and it’s a dazzling achievement by one of the giants of cinema. It’s also an insanely entertaining movie.

Mandingo (1975)

Mandingo, released in 1975, is one of the most notorious of all bad movies, an outrageously lurid blaxploitation epic about slavery, a bit like a camp version of Gone with the Wind with lots of interracial sex. At least that’s how it was viewed at the time, and that’s the view of this film that largely prevails to this day. Quentin Tarantino famously described it as "a big-budget exploitation movie on a par with Showgirls."

But is this an accurate view of the movie? Is it possible that both audiences and critics
have watched this movie without actually seeing it? That the comforting assumption that it’s a so-bad-it’s-good trashy movie has allowed people to avoid confronting the awful truth, that the film-makers mean exactly what they’re saying, and that it’s intended to depict the reality of the slave-owning society in Louisiana in the 1840s. And it’s allowed them to avoid an even more unpalatable thought - that the movie may have succeeded in doing just that.

Mandingo is certainly melodramatic, but it’s melodramatic in the style of the best southern gothic. James Mason is Warren Maxwell, owner of Falconhurst. Maxwell’s plantation is essentially a breeding farm for slaves. He dreams of obtaining a pure-bred mandingo male, the very best breeding stock there is. He also dreams of having a grandson to carry on the family’s proud traditions. His son Hammond is less than keen, but is persuaded to marry his cousin Blanche. She is also breeding stock of the best kind. To console himself, Hammond buys a new bed wench for himself, an attractive female slave named Ellen.

He is not comfortable with the idea of having sex with a white lady, and he’s fairly sure white ladies don’t like having sex anyway. He’s always confined himself to sex with slaves and whores. His enthusiasm for his slave bed partners, and his odd tenderness towards them, is something that has been worrying his daddy quite a bit. Hammond is however willing to do his husbandly duty with his new wife, until his wedding night when he discovers that his new bride is no virgin! He’s had enough sex with virgins to know such things, since he always likes to be the first to break in a new breeding female. It’s a sort of family tradition. He is of course appalled that Blanche has already been “pleasured” by a man. It’s just as well she hasn’t told him that the man in question was her brother (which is possibly one of her family’s proud traditions).

Naturally he no longer wishes to have any physical contact with a woman who is no better than a whore, and he is further repulsed by Blanche’s obvious desire for sex. Blanche is left without any outlet for her appetites, until she decides that perhaps she should sample some “black meat” as well. Obviously there are troubled times ahead for Falconhurst.

While the plot does sound exceptionally lurid, the treatment of the material is absolutely straight. The movie is horrifyingly direct and honest in confronting the evils of slavery, and not just the obvious evils but the corrosive moral effect on everyone involved, victim and oppressor. In that sense it reminds me a little of Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (another movie that continues to make people uncomfortable). It is unflinching in depicting the brutality of slavery, but even more so in exploring the almost unimaginable everyday degradations that are part and parcel of a society that treats humans like livestock.

It also has a good deal to say about the position of women in such a society. Blanche is eventually treated in exactly the same way a slave would be treated, although I won’t spoil the plot by telling you the details. Susan George’s frenzied performance’s as Blanche is a highlight of the movie. She’s over-the-top, but I think she’s perfectly correct to play the part that way. She knows exactly what she’s doing. James Mason takes a similar approach, and again it works. Perry King as Hammond is much more low-key. Despite the exaggerated performances none of the characters come across as mere stereotypes. There’s a humanness to them that makes them even more horrifying than a stereotype would be.

It turns out that Tarantino’s comparison of this movie to Showgirls was strangely apt, although whether Tarantino himself understood just how apt the comparison was is an open question. Both are movies that have been monumentally and willfully misunderstood. And while both appear on the surface to be exploitation movies, that’s exactly what they are not. It’s not surprising that the recent DVD release contains no extras whatsoever. An audio commentary for example might reveal the unpleasant truth that this movie is in fact in deadly earnest. Mandingo is still too confronting to be taken seriously.

Solaris (1972)

Solaris, released in 1972, was in some ways Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s answer to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like 2001 it deals with Big Issues, issues like identity, individuality, what makes us human, and our place in the cosmos.

And like 2001 it’s extremely visual, with sequences that don’t actually advance the plot but they’re there because they convey something through visual images that can’t be conveyed through dialogue. And because the images are simply stunning. I’ve heard people complain about the scenes with the car in the tunnels, but really that sequence is so glorious that I can’t conceive of why anyone would not want to sit back and just enjoy it.

The story, adapted from a novel by the great Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, concerns the ocean-covered planet Solaris, which may or may not be alive, which may or may not be intelligent, which may or may not be aware of us, and which may or may not be wishing to communicate with us. Decades of study have established only one thing for certain – that Solaris remain an enigma. A psychologist has been sent to the Solaris Station, in orbit round the planet, to make a final report on whether the station should be shut down and further study abandoned.

He arrives to find that Solaris has started to actively interact with the handful of remaining scientists on the station, by creating “guests”. These “guests” are more than hallucinations, they are real in a material sense, and are manufactured from the minds of the scientists and take the form of people who have had some importance in their lives. In the case of the psychologist, Kelvin, the “guest” takes the form of his dead wife. But are these guests human? What does that mean, anyway? And why has Solaris started to do this?

One of the ideas that Stanislaw Lem puts forward in several of hi novels is that if we ever do encounter aliens, they are likely to be so strange that we may not even know if we’re dealing with something that is alive or not, and we may have absolutely no way of establishing meaningful contact with them. They may force us to question our concepts of self, or life, and of intelligence. The movie Solaris deals with these issues in a manner that is both intelligent and disturbing. It’s a case of a great novel turned into an equally great film.

Avoid the truly atrocious Hollyood remake.

The Asphyx (1973)

The Asphyx is in some ways an awesomely bad movie, and yet it’s strangely fascinating as well. Directed by Peter Newbrook, it’s the kind of cinematic weirdness that could only have been made in the 70s (1973 in fact). Robert Stephens is Sir Hugo Cunningham, a Victorian scientist with interests in photography, death and spiritualism. Through his experiments in photography he has discovered a kind of spirit-soul thingy that becomes visible for a brief moment at the instant that a person faces death. He finds a way to trap this spirit-soul thingy (the asphyx) and it promises to allow him to conquer death. He hopes to share this wondrous secret with his family. But this is a horror movie, so you just know this is going to turn out to be a Really Bad Idea.

The disregard for logic and commonsense is breath-taking even by horror movie standards, and the plot is filled with You Have Got To Be Kidding Me moments. In fact the entire film is composed of little else but You Have Got To Be Kidding Me moments, to an extent that compels a kind of stunned admiration. It’s original if nothing else.

The movie looks glorious, and there are some splendid Victorian gadgets. Robert Powell plays Sir Hugo’s adopted son, and goes through the whole movie looking as if he can’t believe he agreed to take this part. Robert Stephens doesn’t just overact; he creates whole new realms of overacting. The sheer strangeness of the movie, and the lack of even the slightest trace of coherence to the plot, have a hypnotic effect. You just have to keep watching, in case it gets even odder. And it does. There’s no gore, but there are some rather icky concepts and some quite macabre moments. The asphyx itself is a very bad special effect that despite this still somehow manages to look extremely creepy.

For all its silliness it’s definitely worth a look. They don’t make movies like this any more. And it is certainly entertaining in its own way. The Region 4 DVD looks terrific.