Wounds (2019): This one’s one of the bigger disappointments
of my movie year. On paper, Babak Anvari, the director of the brilliant
Under the Shadow, adapting a story by one of contemporary weird
fiction’s and horror’s finest writers, Nathan Ballingrud, sounds like a surefire
win. However, somehow, the film suffers from weaknesses I didn’t expect to come
up after the director’s last film. A major problem is how unconvincing the
asshole protagonist’s shift into a different, darker reality is (or the shift of
that reality into him), for the film is full of scenes that feel like horror set
pieces instead of organic expressions of what is happening to Will’s reality,
Anvari showing little imagination in his staging of events. The other big hit
against the film is its protagonist itself, who doesn’t come over as the
painfully flawed but interesting protagonist of Ballingrud’s piece but a simple
manchild asshole bar any actual emotional complexity. I can’t help but think
casting Armie Hammer instead of a proper actor wasn’t conducive there.
Vinyan (2008): This film by Fabrice du Welz about a
grief-stricken couple (Emmanuelle Béart and Rufus Sewell) following a probably
imaginary hint about their son who was lost and believed killed during a tsunami
on an odyssey through Thailand and Burma on the other hand does contain a lot of
emotional complexity. For much of its running time, it is really an attempt to
bring the formula of “Heart of Darkness” into a contemporary context, the
director visibly putting a lot of effort into avoiding the – for contemporary
eyes, in Conrad’s own time, the guy was pretty progressive in his views about
race and colonialism – aspects of that approach that could easily be read as
“problematic”. Much of the film is carried by du Welz’s nearly hallucinatory
staging and an intense performance by Béart, and plays out like an arthouse
drama, only in the very end turning into a metaphorically loaded horror film
about the horrors of love, loss, and motherhood.
Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll aka Los Ojos Azules de la
Muñeca Rota aka House of Psychotic Women (1974): A drifter (Paul Naschy) with
fantasies and/or flashbacks about strangling a woman comes into the household of
three emotionally fucked up sisters (Diana Lorys, Eva León and Maria Perschy) as
a handyman. While sexual tension rises, someone murders the surprising number of
young, blue-eyed, blonde women in the area.
This Spanish giallo by Carlos Aured is one of the best Spanish examples of
the style, nearly reaching the intense and often bizarre, dream-like
aesthetization of the best Italian films, including a neat thematic package
about how badly the relations between men and women were in Spain, 1974
(consciously or not, I can’t quite say), and featuring quite a performance by
co-writer Naschy as well as the main female trio. As extra bonuses, there are
the neat and plot-relevant use of “Frère Jacques” in the murder scenes and a
“logical explanation” for what occurred that includes hypnotism and “simple
telepathy”, as well as a very badly prepared corpse.
Showing posts with label carlos aured. Show all posts
Showing posts with label carlos aured. Show all posts
Saturday, November 2, 2019
Friday, May 17, 2019
Past Misdeeds: Horror Rises From The Tomb (1973)
Original title: El espanta surge de la tumba
Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.
Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.
France during the Middle Ages. Warlock Alaric de Marnac (Paul Naschy) and his partner in witchcraft Mabille de Lancré (Helga Liné) are killed for their enthusiasm for various evils, including the drinking of blood and cannibalism, of course. Because that's what you do when you're into the black arts, Alaric and Mabille curse the men responsible for their deaths (one of them Alaric's own brother) and their descendants, promising to one day return to plague them with various horrors.
The time for the charming couple's return finally comes in the 1970s. Alaric's descendant Armand (of course also Naschy), his buddy Maurice Roland (Victor Alcázar) - of course also a witch finder descendant - and their girlfriends poke around in their ancestral legends. One séance with possible supernatural phenomena, and a floating Naschy head later, the quartet decides that the only way to decide if they've been duped by a medium or they really have experienced supernatural shenanigans is for them to travel to the old chateau on the ancestral lands of the de Marnacs, far out in the backwoodsiest part of France, and dig up the head of Alaric (who was decapitated, with body and head buried at different places).
To everyone's surprise, this idea turns out to be a rather large mistake. Soon, Alaric's bodyless, redly lit head (excellent "Naschy in a box with his head sticking out effect there") puts mind control whammies on various members of the cast, murders are committed, hearts are eaten, heads and bodies reunited, Linés revived, and the future of all humanity threatened by two very cranky dead witches. Only the hammer symbol of Thor(!?) and a vague monster destroying manual might possibly save the day.
Carlos Aured's brilliantly, and rather truthfully, titled Horror Rises From The Tomb shows the great Paul Naschy at his most bizarre, with nary a thought given to plot logic or emotional believability but very many thoughts to showing off a series of increasingly weird supernatural occurrences. This time around, Naschy (as so often in his career also the man responsible for the script) and Aured get the required dream-logic particularly right, resulting in a film that uses elements of Naschy's beloved Gothic horror, 70s horror movie bleakness, and curious ideas as if it were out to reconstruct a particularly vivid fever dream.
Aured shows himself to be one of Naschy's more aesthetically conscious directing partners, making use of some excellently shot bleak landscapes, Bava-like coloured lighting, and a lot of cheap red blood to create an atmosphere somewhere between a carnival sideshow, a cheaper version of a Hammer horror movie, and that dream you had where Paul Naschy's head hypnotized you into catching various scantily clad women for him to eat. From time to time, the film's curiously naive, and certainly idiosyncratic, approach to horror even produces not just dream-like and strange, but actually nightmarish sequences, like the one in which some of the dead of the film rise again from the local marsh to do the surviving protagonists harm.
The sense of bleakness so typical for horror from the 70s that characterizes that sequence, as well as a surprising character death by shotgun and the mood of Horror Rises From The Tomb's ending, are part of a recurring negative view on humanity and life itself which would become ever stronger in Naschy's body of work during the second half of the decade and the first half of the 80s until pessimism finally sometimes turned into downright nihilism. This philosophic approach always does mark a strange contrast between Naschy's films and those of the more innocent horror eras he most admired, and often rubs against the sheer loopiness that has always been part of the charm of his films. In this particular case, silly head movie fun and the inevitable doom of everyone involved for no fault of their own go hand in hand, as if they were contrasting impulses in the auteur's personality fighting it out live on screen; the winner is inconclusive.
Even some of Horror Rises From The Tomb's nominal weaknesses turn into surprising strengths. I found it, for example, exceedingly difficult to distinguish between the various female characters in the movie (which is the thing that happens when three of the film's four human female characters are very similar looking attractive brunettes without any character traits), turning the not exactly sharply drawn relationships between the characters diffuse, confusing and ever more dream-like.
Even the old Naschy-ism of pretending his own characters to be virtually irresistible to all women is put to good use here, giving the film an even more surreal feeling. In the case of evil Naschy it's the result of hypnotism anyhow; and really, in the context of everything else going on in the movie, it's not a surprise that Naschy suddenly appearing in a woman's bedroom is answered by instant excited writhing. Evil Naschy, by the way, is the sort of fiend who wears absolutely nothing under his cape, as does Helga Liné who for her part has the rather curious ability of killing men by raking her nails across their backs. On paper, it's all just a way to show off a bit of nudity, of course, but the film's execution turns even standard sleaze material like this into dream-like/nightmarish eroticism of a sort not generally found outside of European horror films of the 70s (more’s the pity).
Horror Rises From The Tomb really is Naschy at his most concentrated, showing off his virtues and faults particularly clearly. This also means that, if you can't stand European horror movies of the non-realistic persuasion, this is not a film for you. If, on the other hand, it's exactly the strange and the weird you're looking for from your horror, you just might find a new favourite movie of the hour.
Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.
Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.
France during the Middle Ages. Warlock Alaric de Marnac (Paul Naschy) and his partner in witchcraft Mabille de Lancré (Helga Liné) are killed for their enthusiasm for various evils, including the drinking of blood and cannibalism, of course. Because that's what you do when you're into the black arts, Alaric and Mabille curse the men responsible for their deaths (one of them Alaric's own brother) and their descendants, promising to one day return to plague them with various horrors.
The time for the charming couple's return finally comes in the 1970s. Alaric's descendant Armand (of course also Naschy), his buddy Maurice Roland (Victor Alcázar) - of course also a witch finder descendant - and their girlfriends poke around in their ancestral legends. One séance with possible supernatural phenomena, and a floating Naschy head later, the quartet decides that the only way to decide if they've been duped by a medium or they really have experienced supernatural shenanigans is for them to travel to the old chateau on the ancestral lands of the de Marnacs, far out in the backwoodsiest part of France, and dig up the head of Alaric (who was decapitated, with body and head buried at different places).
To everyone's surprise, this idea turns out to be a rather large mistake. Soon, Alaric's bodyless, redly lit head (excellent "Naschy in a box with his head sticking out effect there") puts mind control whammies on various members of the cast, murders are committed, hearts are eaten, heads and bodies reunited, Linés revived, and the future of all humanity threatened by two very cranky dead witches. Only the hammer symbol of Thor(!?) and a vague monster destroying manual might possibly save the day.
Carlos Aured's brilliantly, and rather truthfully, titled Horror Rises From The Tomb shows the great Paul Naschy at his most bizarre, with nary a thought given to plot logic or emotional believability but very many thoughts to showing off a series of increasingly weird supernatural occurrences. This time around, Naschy (as so often in his career also the man responsible for the script) and Aured get the required dream-logic particularly right, resulting in a film that uses elements of Naschy's beloved Gothic horror, 70s horror movie bleakness, and curious ideas as if it were out to reconstruct a particularly vivid fever dream.
Aured shows himself to be one of Naschy's more aesthetically conscious directing partners, making use of some excellently shot bleak landscapes, Bava-like coloured lighting, and a lot of cheap red blood to create an atmosphere somewhere between a carnival sideshow, a cheaper version of a Hammer horror movie, and that dream you had where Paul Naschy's head hypnotized you into catching various scantily clad women for him to eat. From time to time, the film's curiously naive, and certainly idiosyncratic, approach to horror even produces not just dream-like and strange, but actually nightmarish sequences, like the one in which some of the dead of the film rise again from the local marsh to do the surviving protagonists harm.
The sense of bleakness so typical for horror from the 70s that characterizes that sequence, as well as a surprising character death by shotgun and the mood of Horror Rises From The Tomb's ending, are part of a recurring negative view on humanity and life itself which would become ever stronger in Naschy's body of work during the second half of the decade and the first half of the 80s until pessimism finally sometimes turned into downright nihilism. This philosophic approach always does mark a strange contrast between Naschy's films and those of the more innocent horror eras he most admired, and often rubs against the sheer loopiness that has always been part of the charm of his films. In this particular case, silly head movie fun and the inevitable doom of everyone involved for no fault of their own go hand in hand, as if they were contrasting impulses in the auteur's personality fighting it out live on screen; the winner is inconclusive.
Even some of Horror Rises From The Tomb's nominal weaknesses turn into surprising strengths. I found it, for example, exceedingly difficult to distinguish between the various female characters in the movie (which is the thing that happens when three of the film's four human female characters are very similar looking attractive brunettes without any character traits), turning the not exactly sharply drawn relationships between the characters diffuse, confusing and ever more dream-like.
Even the old Naschy-ism of pretending his own characters to be virtually irresistible to all women is put to good use here, giving the film an even more surreal feeling. In the case of evil Naschy it's the result of hypnotism anyhow; and really, in the context of everything else going on in the movie, it's not a surprise that Naschy suddenly appearing in a woman's bedroom is answered by instant excited writhing. Evil Naschy, by the way, is the sort of fiend who wears absolutely nothing under his cape, as does Helga Liné who for her part has the rather curious ability of killing men by raking her nails across their backs. On paper, it's all just a way to show off a bit of nudity, of course, but the film's execution turns even standard sleaze material like this into dream-like/nightmarish eroticism of a sort not generally found outside of European horror films of the 70s (more’s the pity).
Horror Rises From The Tomb really is Naschy at his most concentrated, showing off his virtues and faults particularly clearly. This also means that, if you can't stand European horror movies of the non-realistic persuasion, this is not a film for you. If, on the other hand, it's exactly the strange and the weird you're looking for from your horror, you just might find a new favourite movie of the hour.
Friday, June 21, 2013
On Exploder Button: Assignment Naschy: Horror Rises From The Tomb (1973)
Heads. We all know their fiendish ways, their horrible roundness, their hypnotic powers. Now just imagine a head belonging to Paul Naschy himself, rising from his tomb to do typical evil head stuff, like hypnotizing people into carrying him around and bringing him fresh human hearts.
Hold that thought and click on over to this week's column on Exploder Button!
Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,reviews,horror,gothic,carlos aured,paul naschy,emma cohen,victor alcázar,helga liné,other places
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Assignment Naschy: El Retorno De Walpurgis (1974)
aka Curse of the Devil
aka Return of the Werewolf
aka The Return of Walpurgis
In ye olden tymes of the middle ages, when everything was tinted quite yellow, the rather smug knight Irineus Daninsky (Paul Naschy) crushes the witch cult of the Bathorys. Daninsky probably shouldn't have announced his plans of evil smiting beforehand, for Elizabeth Bathory and her co-witches had more than enough time to curse his line before they die. It doesn't save the witches from getting hanged or burned at the stake, but Irineus' descendant of a few generations removed, Waldemar (of course also Paul Naschy), will encounter a whole bunch of problems because of it.
Waldemar lives in ye olden times of the not-19th century, when people dressed funny but - unless they are superstitious peasants - never acted any differently from the 70s; not even pre-marital sex seems to be much of a problem.
Anyway, on a hunt Waldemar shoots a wolf that looks remarkably like a dog but finds himself facing the dead body of a naked gypsy. Oops. Despite Waldemar's attempts at paying them off, the gypsies - probably fuelled by Bathory's curse, or not - decide to teach the guy a lesson with the help of good old Satan. Said lesson consists of first letting gypsy Ilona (Ines Morales) seduce the virginal Waldemar, only to then infect him with the curse of the werewolf.
From then on every full moon night sees Waldemar growing a very hairy face and going around killing off members of the local peasantry. Fortunately for him, there's also an axe murderer running free, so everyone - there's no difference between the wounds an axe or a wolfman leave, it seems - thinks the poor madmen is the guilty party.
When he's not growing more hair in his face than he has on his head, Waldemar spends his time romancing Kinga Wilowa (Fabiola Falcon), the daughter of an engineer newly arrived in town. The romance business is a good thing, too, for as we all know, it's the job of a loving woman to kill a wolfman, especially since Waldemar sure likes to whine about his cursed state once he realizes it, but just as surely doesn't do anything to stop himself from killing further. Too bad for the peasantry and Kinga's family.
This third film in my small, somewhat frightening Assignment Naschy project finds our actor/writer and sometimes director hero producing the up to now most coherent script I've seen by him. Gone are the wastelands of scenes that have no importance at all for the film's plot, gone too is most of the "tell, don't show important things" style, and if you're generous you may even be able to argue the script's pacing is somewhat less slow, even though it still isn't anything for the impatient.
These improvements in Naschy's writing certainly do result in a more coherent film, film a film even that actually seems to know what kind of story it wants to tell: the classic Universal wolfman tale with a bit more blood and breasts and a bit more backstory. Unfortunately, what the film wins in coherence and clarity it loses in dream-like mood and craziness. Where Naschy's other Daninsky films are balancing certain po-faced tendencies with the merry silliness of their slow-motion vampires or yeti-induced lycanthropy, El Retorno wants to be a serious, moody horror melodrama in the gothic mood. On one hand, that's an ambition I respect a lot, but on the other hand, it opens El Retorno up to comparisons with films like Universal's Wolfman and Hammer's The Curse of the Werewolf, it just can't stand up to, even though it is trying its best.
While the acting is pretty decent this time around, Naschy sure is neither an Oliver Reed nor a Lon Chaney Junior (against whose acting much can be said, but who was a hell of a human face for a werewolf), and while El Retorno's script sure is slicker than those of many Naschy films, it is still pretty awkward in comparison to the films it has set its eyes on.
El Retorno's visual side deserves some praise, though. Director Carlos Aured has a fine eye for creating mood through the play of light and shadows, and some rather nifty framing tricks. Aured is certainly helped here by access to some spooky looking locations, as well as a few effective sets. I assume he'd have been able to make quite a nice piece of gothic horror under more fortunate circumstances.
It is a bit ironic that I enjoyed El Retorno De Walpurgis the least of the three movies I've watched as a part of Assignment Naschy until now, even though it's the technically most accomplished of the films, as well as the least idiosyncratic one. It's the old problem with merely competent films being much less interesting than films that are batshit insane, I suspect.
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