Nachtschatten (1972)

Businessman Jan (John van Dreelen) stumbles upon a lonely house belonging to a village in the Lüneburger Heide (heath/moorland in Germany’s Lower Saxony). He feels drawn to the woman living there, Elena Berg (Elke Haltaufderheide), for she’s mysterious, seems in turn vaguely seductive and vaguely defensive, and speaks mostly in vague sentences while using the long, empty stares with lack of eye contact beloved of German filmmaking. A habit Jan shares, incidentally.

Elena wants to sell her house, apparently, and Jan might be interested in buying it, but once it comes to inquiries about concrete details like a price, vagueness sets in again. Jan is also interested in getting into Elena’s pants in the dubious ways beloved of 70s toxic masculinity. She keeps rebuffing him, but she also appears to want him to stay with her for as long as possible and makes many an oblique remark about her brother (wherever he is), death, and love.

Niklaus Schilling’s Nachtschatten – which translates so nicely to “Nightshade” it even keeps its ambiguity - is one among the very manageable number of German sort of arthouse horror movies. Neither the Autorenfilm (West Germany’s version of arthouse) nor the country’s movies made for an actual audience were very keen on delving into Germany’s deep well of the fantastical, so there’s no coherent tradition of this kind of filmmaking here post World War II, and thus the few films of the kind that were somehow made all feel somewhat disconnected from each other.

By virtue of the leaden pacing and disconnected acting style dominating the Autorenfilm, and in something of an ironic twist, Nachtschatten feels related to the kind of film Jess Franco or Jean Rollin were making, though without these directors’ sense of personal obsessions, and only a very mild kind of eroticism instead of full-on obsessive kink. It does manage to feel languid rather than stodgy for most of its running time, though, and from time to time, its slowness and unwillingness to say anything directly if it can instead have a character stare into empty air for a bit takes on a quality of poetic, dreamy unreality I’m unsure Schilling was actually going for.

Visually, this is a curious mix of the Gothically coded – the Heide is about as gothic as my part of Germany gets – and drab 70s interiors shot as if the director were willing them into becoming something more fantastical, dream sequences and characters that go through their daily life as if they were dreams – until it becomes some stiff German art business for a couple of scenes again.

It’s certainly an interesting effort, at least halfway towards becoming something special.

Three Films Make A Post: The Pressure is Rising, The Adrenaline is Rushing, The Clock is Ticking

Run Lola Run aka Lola Rennt (1998): As a German born in the second half of the 70s, I really should have been all about Tom Tykwer’s hyperactive little action movie with an alternative timeline twist at the time. In actuality, I’ve watched it for the first time this week, and find myself half impressed by how much mileage Tykwer gets out of all the hallmarks of 90s cinema that usually make films ugly, if not just unwatchable.

Here, as is in some of the films of Dominik Graf, all of the stylistic excesses of a time of filmmaking turn into an actual style that feels like the only correct way to tell this particular story; or really, the style is the story here. Which does lead to my major problem with the film: its main characters may be really good at running, but are also spectacularly shitty people we are somehow supposed to care about because they are in love. Or something?

It’s not a deal breaker – I’ve cheered on even worse people in other movies after all – but also not exactly something to endear a movie to me.

The Last Sacrifice (2024): Speaking of not endearing, there’s this thing, a film that takes a Wikipedia-look level at an actual crime, uses bits and pieces of horror cinema that never really fit the voiceover talking at us to portray it, and suggests an influence of said crime on folk horror it never takes any effort to actually substantiate. It also tries to connect it to the cultural development of the UK without ever showing much of a grasp of that development beyond the most superficial talking points.

Like most true crime documentaries, and especially those with a horror bent, it’s shoddy, thoughtless and always more than a little offensive.

fuji_jukai.mov (2016): For quite some time, Katsumi Sakashita’s POV horror movie where footage of a film crew interviewing people of what we usually call Aokigahara forest in the West – and the film mostly calls jukai – is intercut with that supposedly shot by a girl going into the forest to commit suicide, accompanied by two other girls she met on the web who just want to watch, had been more of a rumour than an actual film outside of Japan.

It is a fine, low budget example of its form that sometimes shows its constraints in the performances and some unideal set design. Its emphasis on very human horrors and a central twist reminded me more than a little of the wonderful Banned from Broadcast series (more about them on a later date), but it certainly is on a level of accomplishment where that comparison is a compliment instead of to a film’s detriment.

Waxworks (1924)

Original title: Das Wachsfigurenkabinett

A poet (William Dieterle when he was still called Wilhelm) looking for a paying job wanders into a waxworks that appears to be part of travelling circus. He is quickly hired to write tales about the three waxen main exhibits (I suppose for dramatic readings to paying customers=. He also finds himself inspired to romance - perhaps because the pretty daughter of the cabinet’s owner apparently has no concept of personal space and hovers nearly on his shoulder while he’s writing.

The tales he writes – all with Dieterle and the actress playing the daughter also taking on the romantic leads in them – make up the meat of the movie.

First, we learn how the calif Harun al Raschid (Emil Jannings) lost his arm in a macabre-grotesque bit of the kind of orientalism the 20s and 30s particularly loved, the “exotic” location providing the possibility to suggest a degree of cruelty and corruption in those in power you’d probably not have when setting your tale in Weimar or Berlin or the contemporary USA. This is segment is a bit long in the middle, but also features a surprisingly dynamic action sequence with Dieterle making his way over the very expressionist roofs of fantasy-Baghdad and ends on a gag macabre enough, my jaw dropped a little.

Next up in the cruel foreigner parade is Ivan the Terrible (Conrad Veidt), being crazy, evil and sadistic until he finally succumbs to madness in a climactic – expressionist – freakout. Also featuring are a poisoner and his giant hourglass and as much sadism as you were allowed to suggest in a movie in 1924 (decidedly more than in a movie made twenty years later).

Finally, the film ends on the shortest tale, in which the Poet gets tired and dreams and reality begin to mix so much, he believes Spring-Heeled Jack (Werner Krauss) – whom the film appears to confuse with Jack the Ripper – is murdering the Daughter. This segment of the film is appropriately dream-like – in part thanks to some spectacular directorial tricks, the general air of unreality expressionist German cinema always carries, but probably also because the only remaining cuts of Das Wachsfigurenkabinett are missing about twenty minutes. Given how short the Spring-Heeled Jack segment is, it is probable these missing bits and pieces would belong to it and turn it into a more conventional story.

As it stands, the fragmentary nature of this last segment does make it even more nightmarish, like the actual product of a mind that has spent perhaps a little too much time on the morbid nature of the tales that came before it.

While Das Wachsfigurenkabinett isn’t quite the movie about wax figures coming to life some older write-ups of it promise, it is absolutely a film standing with both feet in the tradition of the macabre. This feels very much like an attempt to get as close to the tone of contes cruels and grand guignol as possible, using the visual elements of German expressionism to embody the characters’ cruelty and obsessive natures through pretty incredible sets.

Co-directors Leo Birinsky and Paul Leni use quite an impressive amount of dynamic editing techniques, creating suspense before the concept even had a technical term on the silver screen.

It’s a highly impressive movie, at least for those viewers who can stomach the problematic nature of its portrayal of non-Western cultures – though I’d argue the film’s whole feel is so unreal and clearly belonging to the world of nightmares, suggesting there’s any attempt here at saying much about actual historical figures or countries seems an ill fit to the film at hand.

Possession (1981)

The marriage of Mark (Sam Neill) – vaguely involved in the kind of espionage business one expects in a film set in Cold War era Berlin – is on the skids.

While Mark has played the usually absent dad and husband, his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) has started an affair with macho new age weirdo Heinrich (Heinz Bennent). She sure as shit didn’t learn any yoga from the guy though, for she and Mark proceed to work through their crisis through shouting, writhing and a bit of self-mutilation or spousal abuse when the mood strikes.

And that’s before Anna births a tentacled thing in the subway she’s starting to feed with human blood.

So much has been written about Andrzej Zulawski’s much-beloved arthouse psychodrama horror masterpiece by some of the more insightful critics, there’s certainly very little new I can add to the corpus. But from time to time, just jotting down personal impressions can be a bit of fun – at least for this writer; my imaginary readers are long-suffering anyway.

I find it rather interesting how closely related Possession is to a kind of arthouse movie I can’t stand at all, the type where everyone communicates in pseudo-philosophic portentous sentences that aren’t as deep as the writers appear to think they are. Really, the dialogue here is mostly exactly this, but is heightened in effect and meaning through the brutally physical performances – particularly by Adjani, who sometimes appears to drag Neill bodily into the mind space of insane intensity and actual madness the film takes place in – and direction that goes all out in every aspect.

Zulawski working though his own demons by way of European 70s horror influences as much as the more classy stuff he imbibed is a sight to behold, or actually, feels like a director conjuring up aspects of himself any sane person would hardly want to acknowledge, certainly not show to an audience in a form feeling this raw. This is not the work of an edge lord flirting with the dangerous life by acting like an asshole child – this is much darker, much more genuine, and, perhaps, actually dangerous. At the same time, this is also a movie featuring a scene where Isabelle Adjani fucks a tentacle monster, and Sam Neill drowns a guy in a toilet, so Zulawski is certainly not afraid to let his genre arthouse movie actually be a genre movie, not too far from the traditions established in Italy and other parts of Western Europe.

The Silent Star (1960)

Original title: Der schweigende Stern

(There’s also a cut-down, re-cut, English dubbed version of the film called First Spaceship on Venus – I’m not talking about that one here)

The Near Future. Scientists discover a curious alien artefact in the area of the Tunguska meteor impact. Its origin is apparently Venus, and it contains what appears to be a message in a language linguists – first among them a Chinese (Hua-Ta Tang) and an Indian (Kurt Rackelmann, in brownface) expert – are trying and failing hard to decipher.

Still, the scientific community, gifted with the Soviet spaceship initially meant for a Mars expedition, decides to send a mission to Venus to find our intelligent neighbours. Apart from the gentlemen already mentioned, the crew is international in a way to give the current US president a heart attack while screeching about “DEI” or “wokeness”. Even an American scientist (Oldrich Lukes) takes part, though to the unhappiness of his bosses at “the Consortium”.

There’s some drama on the ship – cue a painful doomed romance between the traumatized astro-medico (Yoko Tani) and the German, hot shot pilot with the receding hairline (Günther Simon) – but eventually, once they arrive on Venus, the crew make exciting discoveries in what turn out to be the ruins of a civilization that took a wrong turn.

Science Fiction, called “Utopian” literature there (as often here in Western Germany as well), was a popular literary genre in the DDR (or German Democratic Republic, Eastern Germany). Whenever the political stars of censorship and propaganda aligned correctly, there were attempts to also make SF cinema happen.

This first SF film produced by the DEFA (the state’s very own film company) – in cooperation with Poland and an abortive attempt at working with French Pathé – was directed by Kurt Maetzig, a higher-up in the DEFA structure who apparently had the clout to get it made, if going through three different batches of writers on the way, in turns making it less, then more, then less propagandistic. This is based on a Stanislaw Lem novel, but I don’t know how it compares.

Technically and visually, this is quite the achievement, presenting a future visually not only inspired by western SF cinema on film but also by choice pulp SF cover art. There’s an orderliness and cleanliness to the designs that rubs this Alien-made viewer emotionally the wrong way a little, but objectively, the mix of grandiosity and sobriety is utterly beautiful.

Once we arrive on Venus, the film appears to prefigure Bava’s Planet of Vampires, presenting a planet full of objects the characters themselves often can’t categorize as artificial or natural. There’s an alienness to this part of the film that’s very Lem (in a specific mode), and still works to be somewhat disquieting.

On the level of narrative and characters, Silent Star is considerably weaker – its first half is a bit of a slog, full of the international cast speaking slowly in the emotionless German dub, and a de-emphasis on the more dramatic elements of what is happening on screen that sometimes feels nearly perverse.

Thematically, the Hiroshima and heroism-doomed romance fits the darker elements of the film  well, but its execution has an antiseptic quality that never suggests this may be about actual human emotion instead of fitting thematic material.

Speaking of themes, this is absolutely a film standing in the shadow of the H-bomb, seeing this use of nuclear power as a kind of (perfectly atheist) original sin, or rather the great crossroads of humanity: do we use this power responsibly and go off into a bright future, or do we vote for egotism and self-destruction like the Venusians? Not the sort of thing you’d get treated this earnestly in many American SF films of the era.

It is of course fascinating to see a film that works from very different ideological assumptions than much SF material on screen. The emphasis on international cooperation and serious and respectful co-existence between all kinds of people appears rather earlier than in western screen SF. It is presented a little demonstrative, of course (this is after all also a propaganda piece). Still, from the perspective of 2025, this kind of future feels like an impossible dream, and I found myself feeling melancholia and nostalgia for a future that never came to be. Hell, the Eastern parts of united Germany are one of the hot beds of racism and right-wing thought in my country these days, so there’s also some sad irony to be had.

In the Lost Lands (2025)

In a post-apocalyptic future that has turned into something of a weird fiction style fantasy world. Ageless witch Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich) plies her trade in what is apparently the only city left – a hellhole of slavery and inquisition-based religion ruled over by a by now very old Overlord. Alys is hunted by the inquisition, but manages to escape regularly from their clutches, and even the gallows, accidentally putting revolutionary ideas into the heads of the enslaved populace on the way.

For reasons never explained, Alys is bound to fulfil any wish somebody pays her for. The fulfilment of these wishes, as she warns as a matter of course, doesn’t usually work out as pleasantly as her customers hope.

Surprisingly even to Alys, the Overlord’s Queen (Amara Okereke) comes by with a very specific, and somewhat peculiar, wish – she wants to acquire the power of a shapeshifter. To find one to rob of his powers, Alys has to travel into the Lost Lands, the dangerous wastelands surrounding the city. She needs a guide through these places, and chooses the drifter Boyce (Dave Bautista), who just happens to be the secret lover of the Queen. On their travels, fighting their way through various dangers and hunted by a train carrying Alys’s arch enemy, the Inquisition’s main Enforcer (Arly Jover), they do of course fall in love.

In between, we pop in on the Queen and her palace intrigues.

Here I am again, enjoying a Paul W.S. Anderson movie. He’s not always making it easy – his insistence on casting his wife Jovovich who still can’t act her way out of a paper bag is certainly a particular stumbling block for me. But say what you want about the guy, he’s clearly doing the auteur thing where he puts all of his personal obsessions into his movies, and doesn’t give a crap if they are en vogue or not. He’s very much like Wes Anderson in that way, but with more monsters.

Visually, tonight’s Anderson has clearly become fascinated by the colours grey and brown, going for a wasteland so desaturated and woozily shot, the insane spotlight glint in Bautista’s eyes coming with its own lens flare tends to be the most colourful thing on screen. And yes, in Anderson’s world, eye glints have their own intense – and I mean intense - lens flare effect, as have torches, skulls and everything else the polishing-mad wasteland maid I assume roams the place just off-camera has polished to a sheen.

Ill-advised and ugly as it may be, this is certainly a conscious aesthetic decision, making the supposedly ugly post-apocalyptic wasteland indeed pretty damn ugly.

As ugly as his world looks, and as grimdark as things get, there’s a palpable sense of fun here that also made Monster Hunter rather enjoyable. The monsters, the incredible gothic train, the fucking werewolf, the mediaeval Mad Max costumes are all things Anderson clearly has a blast with getting on screen. Quite a bit of that enjoyment makes its way at least to this viewer. Plus, I always appreciate Bautista. See also, rule of cool.

Three Films Make A Post: Where the cashiers have no name

Supermarkt aka Supermarket (1974): If you know German director Roland Klick mostly for his psychedelic noir western Deadlock or his Dennis Hopper coke freak-out White Star, you’ll be in a for a whole world of pain in the form of an hour of very earnest Hamburg-set naturalism pasted onto the beginning of a pretty great, naturalist, heist film. Needless to say, simple guy as I am, I don’t appreciate this approach much.

However, it’s not that Klick isn’t good at the earnest naturalism bit – one could imagine him going on to become a German Ken Loach figure in a more interesting German cinema – the problem is all mine. I just find earnest naturalism the least interesting mode for a fictional narrative possible and have never seen the point to it. Surely,if you want to go for straightforward representation of the world as it is, why not make a reportage or a documentary? Hell, I might even praise you for that one (if only with backhanded remarks that I prefer Herzog style documentaries all about poetic truth, of course). As it stands, this just isn’t a film for me.

Only the River Flows aka He bian de cuo wu (2023): Speaking of films that aren’t for me, this arthouse crime drama for the Cannes crowd by Wei Shujun suffers from what I see as a weakness of most of the minor wave of mainland Chinese arthouse noir cop films of this style: an attempt to make genre films so critical of their genre they go out of their way to extract all joy and excitement from it. No thrills in our serial killer thriller, sir! No excitement to finding the killer! Hell, not actually finding the killer clearly is the way to go.

This particular example of the form eventually descends into a vague kind of surrealism, akin to Lynch without a sense of humour or a heart (so not very much like Lynch at all), without the power to actually make its surrealism feel like anything of substance or with a point; indeed, things are so opaque in the end, I have no idea why the film exists at all.

Admittedly, it is very well shot, and decrepit 90s China is evoked just as well – I don’t have any idea why, though.

Fantomas (1947): This second attempt to drag Fantomas into the sound film era after one in 1932, as directed by Jean Sacha, certainly has no ambitions at being anything more than a potboiler.

As such, it has decent entertainment value eighty years later: there are a handful of nice, mad science-y sets, some of the action is staged on a more than decent level, and after pacing issues early on, things zip along nicely, and mindlessly. The whole affair suffers from a very flat Fantomas performance by Marcel Herrand, but kinda makes up for it with a very young Simone Signoret running circles around every other actor as the villain’s virtuous daughter Hélène.

In an uncommon move for 1947, Hélène is a rather competent heroine who even takes part in the physical parts of the plot, which obviously is the sort of thing I like in my pulpy nonsense films.

Scorched Earth (2024)

Original title: Verbrannte Erde

More than ten years after he had to flee the city following some business that went very badly indeed in In the Shadows, the first film of what is supposed to become a trilogy one day, armed robbery specialist Trojan (Mišel Matičević) returns to Berlin.

Looking for work from the few contacts he has left after his long absence, Trojan eventually manages to join the team of a properly planned, classic art heist. As is typically the case with a movie heist, stealing something and surviving the aftermath are very different things indeed, so Trojan has to cope with the vagaries of his business, particularly a client who’d rather not pay the thieves for the painting they stole for him.

This year, I’m apparently taking a deeper dive into the easily missable strands of proper genre filmmaking that developed in Germany in the last twenty-five years or so, typically hidden away in TV movies and films made by arthouse filmmakers.

It is somewhat curious that of all the German arthouse filmmaking movements of the last decades, it is the filmmakers of the Berlin School who have proven to be quite the genre filmmakers if they want to – if you’d only watch Arslan or Michael Petzold in their genre mode, you might start to believe we Germans are rather good at making this sort of thing.

In the Shadows. the first Trojan movie from 2010, crossed a clear love for Jean-Pierre Melville gangster movies in their most minimal mode of coolness with a sense of cold observation. That’s still a huge part of this rather belated sequel, but this time around, Arslan’s focussed – and pretty stylish – minimalism allows for a degree of warmth. Or rather, despite sparse/ultra-focussed (take your pick) characterisation, the director allows his characters to break professional coolness in a manner that suggests the humanity below it more clearly than he did in the earlier film.

Their coldness, the film appears to suggest, isn’t quite as natural as it appears, and rather an adaptation to their environment – Berlin. The city of this film is cold, empty, and never feels like a place actual people are meant to inhabit – it’s just streets and buildings empty of personality, often even devoid of the impression of habitability, and the only way one can find to survive in it is to stop being a person.

This does of course also fit nicely to some of the preoccupations of the kind of heist and gangster movie tradition Arslan’s film is part of: there’s not only the coolness and minimalism of Melville, but also the meticulousness of Mann, but without the latter’s slickness. As is often the case with characters like this, at least to me, there’s the shadow of Donald E. Westlake’s Parker hanging over Trojan and the films he appears in. With Parker, Trojan shares a calm ruthlessness that accepts acts of violence he deems necessary without compunction, his professionalism in a business that isn’t a proper business with proper professionals at all, the kind of trustworthiness that means he won’t stab you in the back unless you try and stab him first.

As a comparison, this is as high a compliment as you can pay to the protagonist of this kind of crime film, as well as the movie he’s in.

Harms (2013)

Professional criminal Harms (Heiner Lauterbach) gets out of jail after the usual fourteen, fifteen year span movies use in these cases. He’s getting bored rather quickly with sitting around and having sex with prostitute Jasmin (Valentina Sauca) who appears inexplicably fond of him.

So he’s taking an opportunity to get back into the game, when a not at all dubious character (Friedrich von Thun), invites him into handling a big armed robbery for him.

Harms grabs some members of his old crew, some hacker dude his shady partner finds, and goes to work. The planning phase is made difficult by a variety of problems, most of which need to be resolved by violence, and the actual robbery does feature some sudden and inevitable betrayal.

Which isn’t a spoiler, because prime among the weaknesses of Nikolai Müllerschön’s Harms is a script that feels the need to include every gangster and heist movie cliché ever seen in a movie while putting very little effort into properly connecting them. It’s not as if I expect originality from this sort of affair, but some care, focus, and judicious excision of superfluous side business would have done wonders here.

That might also have cut down the cast of characters to a number Müllerschön could actually handle – as it stands, there are a lot of characters in the movie who aren’t terribly important, and quite a few actors who seem unprepared for the kind of naturalistic tough guy acting the film clearly asks for. In typical German overcompensation, the dialogue often tries rather too hard for tough guy strong language in ways that feel ridiculous instead of believable – it’s not just that nobody would be talking this way, it’s that nobody involved manages to convince they indeed are.

Lauterbach is pretty good, though, apparently enjoying the opportunity to break many of the rules of German screen acting and work more via physical presence than overenunciation.

From time to time, the film manages to get up to a good scene or two, but its lack of focus prevents Harms from capitalizing on this enough to become a good movie. Or really, to become more than a series of scenes.

Der Skorpion (1997)

Josef Berthold (the inexplicably popular-in-Germany at the time Heiner Lauterbach) heads an anti-drug crime department of Munich police. He’s rather on the zealous side, so his relationships with his wife Lili (Renate Krößner) and his insufferable late teenage son Robin (Marek Harloff) are increasingly strained.

For the local drug lords, Josef is just too damn successful. In what appears to be an attempt to demonstrate certain dangers to him, Lili is drugged in a restaurant and nearly dies in an accident caused by her state. This doesn’t exactly suggests a reason for backing down to Josef. Rather, he’s now out for blood instead of putting people behind bars; at the same time, his relationship with Marek further deteriorates.

Marek flees into a rather sudden relationship with a porn actress (Birge Schade), drugs, and general teenage raging.

While that’s going on, someone appears to begin killing their way up the chain of the local drug business, particularly the parts most probably connected to the attack on Lili. Josef would be the obvious suspect here.

The films of Dominik Graf, with their often somewhat crazed intensity, their intense, rough, brilliant 35mm camera work and their love for maximalist low budget genre filmmaking are a curious fit for German TV, yet still, he’s been making this sort of thing for decades and is somehow still at it, even getting a good number of German TV prizes for material these things would typically not take a second look at. Hell, he even managed to smuggle a very late, nearly perfect giallo into the world of German crime TV in 2011 in  form of the astonishing “Polizeiruf 110” Cassandras Warnung.

This much earlier TV movie made for the ZDF (Germany’s second public TV channel) is Graf at his most intense, featuring a plot that includes general crime business, a giallo-esque serial killing (with a totally not giallo-esque solution), many highly improbable random turns, and heightened family melodrama. Added to this is the most teenage scenery chewing ever to chew scenery by Marek Harloff - who manages to be so improbably annoying his extremity makes him feel like a real teenager again or rather like all of them at once - gratuitous sex and nudity, highly effective suspense sequences, and sudden bursts of quiet nearly as intense as the film’s breathless loudness. It’s as if a bit of worthy, bland German crime TV had been bitten by a radioactive Italian filmmaker or possessed by the ghosts of certain 70s attempts at establishing a German genre film (something Graf made two documentaries about).

It’s the visual and narrative energy that holds this whole thing made out of disparate parts together, a willingness to just follow through with weird ideas, but also Graf’s skill with every disparate part taken separately: he can do the melodrama, the thriller, the arthouse coming of age, the German cop show business, and appears to never have heard you’re not supposed to do them all at once. I’m certainly not going to disagree with the man.

Three Films Make A Post: His Battle To Save The Alaskan Wilderness And Protect Its People Can Only Be Won…

On Deadly Ground (1994): Steven Seagal can’t act, Steven Seagal can’t fight, Steven Seagal can’t direct, yet he’s still doing all of it, at this point in his career at a major studio budget level with a cast that includes Michael Caine, Joan Chen (playing an Alaskan native American, because of course she is), Billy Bob Thornton and a horde of beloved character actors. There’s a commendable pro-eco message (including an absurd lecture in the bored tones of Seagal himself after he has murdered his way through dozens of people) that’s permanently made absurd by Seagal’s bully asshole thug persona, and the huge amount of “Native Spirituality” kitsch that’s funnier than it is offensive.

Also very funny are Caine’s attempts at pretending to be American, Seagal’s attempts at philosophy, and Seagal’s attempts at looking like a badass instead of the guy who pays you so you pretend he beats you up.

Schrei – denn ich werde dich töten! (“Scream – for I am going to kill you!”) aka School’s Out (1999): At the turn of the century, German cable TV did hope for a bit of that sweet, sweet Scream money. Thus this low-gore slasher by Robert Sigl (who once made the pretty wonderful Laurin but then had to make his way through the German cinematic and TV wastelands) with a script by German weird fiction luminary – though you wouldn’t notice here - Kai Meyer.

As far as Scream-offs go, this is one of the less comedic attempts at the style, and, apart from the bits Sigl nearly quotes directly from the Craven film, more like a mid-level giallo with teens and more competence than stylistic brilliance on screen.

It’s pretty good fun on a rainy Sunday morning, though.

Das Mädcheninternat – Deine Schreie wird niemand hören (“The Girls’ Boarding School – No one will hear your screams”) aka Dead Island: Schools Out 2 (2001): Sigl and Meyer re-team for this sequel that finds final girl Nina (Katharina Wackernagel) getting into trouble with a killer in a nun costume in an island boarding school/mental health institution. There’s less direct Scream in here than in the first movie and even more giallo, though this again doesn’t come together as well as one could hope for given the actual talent involved on director’s chair and script. The acting isn’t bad either, yet there’s a certain lack of energy here that gets in the way of any actual tension.

This, too, isn’t a bad little movie if one is in the appropriate mood, mind you.

Friends of Friends (2002)

Original title: Die Freunde der Freunde

Gregor (Matthias Schweighöfer) is a boarding school pupil, a couple of months before final exams. To be precise, he’s going to a Gymnasium, the type of school you’d go to in Germany when college is a realistic proposition for you. In combination with the boarding school, and the way the kids in the movie relate to money, there’s a class assumption here – none of these kids has parents working in a factory, that’s for sure. Gregor’s closest friend is his roommate Artur (Florian Stetter), and these two are a study in contrasts – where Gregor apparently carries quite a few romantic notions about life and particularly love, Artur’s the wild one (if not an actual sociopath) who we can well imagine to get into the kind of trouble he won’t be able to slip out of easily in the future.

Right now, he’s just doing stuff like lying rather a lot – and implicitly betraying Gregor’s truancy habits to school authorities early on in the movie, though it’s never going to outright tell us thus – and encouraging threesomes with his girlfriend Pia (Jessica Schwarz) and Gregor.

Gregor’s drawn to Artur’s incipient dangerous life, but becomes distracted when he meets Billie (Sabine Timoteo), a young, single mother, with an evasive air of mystery and the kind of background rich kid Gregor clearly can’t quite comprehend. While Gregor is instantly smitten, Billie is acting hot and cold, perhaps using Gregor for things he’s not worldly enough to understand, perhaps genuinely feeling drawn to his still schoolboyish kind of innocence and having to step back for reasons of her own.

At the borders of the plot, there are elements of the strange: Gregor’s belief that there’s some fated other for everyone seemingly being true, ghosts that have appeared to Billie as well as to Artur at the moments of someone’s death.

Whenever I write about German films, I tend to lament Germany’s deplorable lack of proper genre filmmaking. That’s certainly not director Dominik Graf’s fault, for Graf has made a career out of making genre films wherever he can get away with it, be it in the often much too worthy format of German TV crime movie series like “Tatort” and “Polizeiruf 110”, or in TV movies like this.

Proper genre movies, but not exactly straightforward ones, mind you, for one of the director’s main strengths is a willingness to be strange (or even outright Weird), hopefully causing a maximum of confusion in your typical German viewer of Saturday evening crime.

It has been ages since I’ve consciously watched anything directed by Graf, so I’m not even sure I wasn’t terribly confused or even annoyed by him the last time I encountered them myself.

The film at hand has elements of a crime drama, but these are mostly kept at the borders of what’s going on, suggested to be the parts of Artur’s life Gregor has just learned to ignore or choses not to see, as he choses to ignore or not see rather a lot of things around him.

I rather prefer to see the film as a ghost story, one told sideways and at an angle of the way ghost stories are usually told, but one carrying quite an emotional impact quite beyond the realm of jump scares, an impact that’s entwined with a sense of melancholy and sadness, a feeling of characters drifting in directions quite beyond their grasp, control, or perhaps even understanding.

Which does seem appropriate for something based on a Henry James tale of all things - though I doubt James would have been terribly happy with the nudity and the sometimes realistically coarse language in the film. Nor seems Graf’s masterful treatment of the confusion of being young very Jamesian to me – I am pretty sure Henry James was born middle-aged.

Die Freunde’s impact is carried by two things that stand very much in contrast – highly naturalistic acting by a great cast (young Schweighöfer was quite the thing, but Timoteo, Stetter and Schwarz are on the same level) and an incredibly thick mood of unreality. Graf shoots in the kind of grainy digital video that makes quite a few art-minded films of this era look ugly and cheap as hell, but hits exactly the point where this look turns the world of his film strange and off-kilter even when nothing strange or off-kilter is actually happening on screen. There’s a washed-out quality to the film’s reality that suggests a drift towards something inexplicable, and to my eyes, it’s pure magic, particularly combined with an electronic score by Sven Rossenbach and Florian van Volxem that is at once utterly of its time and perfectly outside of any time.

How Graf managed to get this approved by the never exactly weirdness-affine people in charge of German Publicly Owned TV, I can’t imagine. I’m just glad that he did.

Three Films Make A Post: Where there is no more death we shall meet again.

Laurin (1989): This is that rare example of an interesting, moody German horror movie. Of course, director Robert Sigl shot in Hungary with predominantly Hungarian actors and crew, so few Germans were actually involved in the production.

This is an example of Gothically inflected, psychological horror concerning the business of a girl starting to grow up, a serial killer, and possibly ghosts, slow-moving yet emotionally and metaphorically intense. Sigl is rather good at imbuing small gestures with a depth of complicated meanings, which traditionally tends to be the sort of thing I like. This being a serious German movie, certain weaknesses show whenever there’s a need for traditional suspense (which isn’t something we do in Germany), but the mood of childhood nightmare is so thick, I won’t blame Sigl for not understanding how to stage a chase scene effectively.

Black Cab (2024): On the plot level, Bruce Goodison’s Black Cab isn’t a terribly original mix of urban legends and contemporary horror tropes, but as a mood piece, it has considerable strengths.

There’s a dreamlike unreality to the various night drives under duress here that make the involvement  of the outright supernatural utterly plausible via the mood provided. Another strong element is a pleasantly deranged performance by Nick Frost as a very sinister taxi driver that greatly strengthens the impact of some well-chosen moments of the kind of dread women suffer from terrible men on a daily basis.

If this sort of thing works for you, you might be as willing to forgive the film the weaknesses of its plotting as much as I did.

Suzhou River (2000): Finishing today’s trilogy of vibes (see how hip I am, fellow kids?), Lou Ye’s play on (and with) elements of noir and Vertigo is all ambiguous doublings of characters, moments and movement, hand-held camera that signals subjectivity instead of authenticity, mermaids and the curious beauty of an industrially wasted river.

Lou’s play with the meta-level of his narrative mostly manages to avoid getting annoying (there’s typically little worse than a filmmaker getting precious about this sort of thing to me) by the amount of ambiguity it shows: this isn’t meta to show how many movies the director has seen, nor to make a precise point, but because it is a movie about ghosts and phantoms, on the screen and off, and the ghost of old movies are ghosts as real as any other.

F for Fake (1973)

Hired to take over/make use of the bare bones of a documentary made by François Reichenbach about art forger and general high living faker Elmyr de Hory and his biographer and semi-professional liar Clifford Irving, Orson Welles starts having a bit of fun, turning the material into a meditation on art and reality, the nature of forgery, the flim-flam elements of his own particular talents, and takes an opportunity to show off his late life partner Oja Kodar  – in a very unreconstructed kind of way you really wouldn’t encounter anymore these days, very much for better and for worse.

Also involved are thoughtful moments of Orson – in his role as one of the great and wonderful hams of the screen - hamming it up considerably when the opportunity for a monologue arises (or whenever he simply fancies doing one), some moments of “high art” theatre, and a dirty story about great painter made particularly funny via a combination of “look how hot my girlfriend is!” and Michel Legrand’s score going full softcore soundtrack on us.

All of this is very Orson Welles in many aspects. Welles treats the project as yet another opportunity to show off his – considerable – intelligence and his – hardly in need of an adjective - talents – real and imagined. On paper, this should be a rather unpleasant watch – Orson holding forth to his friends with a glass of wine or three, Orson showing magic tricks, Orson talking up his girlfriend, Orson wearing his favourite hat, and so on, and so forth. In practice, like most of the man’s weirder projects, there’s a genuine charm to film and man. Sure, he’s full of himself, but he also appears to approach his audience as people who are on his own level (up in the stratosphere, at least), whom he invites to think about a couple of things, to have various very diverse kinds of fun with him, to listen to interesting people tell even more interesting lies and truths, and to present us with a last run-through of what Orson Welles was all about.

Only the very disagreeable would disagree with this approach, and only the much too serious would not be caught up in Welles’s charm. I for one don’t want to be any of these things, at least this evening.

Die Pest in Florenz (1919)

Some time during the renaissance. The beautiful courtesan Julia (Marga Kierska) comes from free-loving Venice to stuffy Florence, a town dominated by the church on one hand and a deeply conservative council of elders on the other. Her beauty inflames the already existing frictions between the old and the young, particularly putting the lord of the town (Otto Mannstaedt) and his son Lorenzo (Anders Wikmann), who both fall for her instantly, against each other.

Lorenzo kills his father when the old man attempts to rape Julia, and makes himself king of Florence, driving away the churchmen and the elders. With Julia, he starts a reign of incessant partying and what goes as orgies on screen in 1919, getting the intertitles all in a tizzy about their immorality while the 2023 audience whistles a happy tune.

Only a hermit monk named Medardus or Franziskus (depending on which version of intertitles you watch this with, in any case played by the grandly gesturing Theodor Becker) sets himself against the horrors of people fucking. But Julia is so beautiful! And into weird looking monks! And still hot even when they visit hell together in a vision! So Medardus is set up for a bit of a fall, to be portrayed through ever more gesturing and bugging of eyes, of course. Though, to be fair, Becker is rather brilliantly in the scene in which he murders Lorenzo in cold blood. Eventually, God gets so annoyed by the scenes of people frolicking drunkenly, or perhaps the murder, he sends the plague in the direction of Florence.

Otto Rippert’s silent movie epic Die Pest in Florenz may not be an obvious choice as part of my October two-step of horror love on this blog, what with much of it being a historical costume drama with what I can’t help but read as a lot of high-handed conservative moralizing and hand-wringing. It does, however, contain quite a few seeds that would in the future grow into the dark woods of gothic horror on screen. Medardus’s vision of a hell that includes a river of writing bodies and a fire-breathing (one-headed) dog certainly belongs into the realm of the macabre, and there’s a sense of true eeriness surrounding the film’s deeply medieval personification of the plague as an emaciated figure strolling, sometimes dancing, while all around it its victims fall down in pains of death. Medardus’s flight through the catacombs is another moment you’ll find repeated in different forms again and again in the future, as if writer Fritz Lang (in one of his last attempts at writing for someone else) had stumbled upon and scratched free some of the cornerstones of horror, but couldn’t quite bring himself to focus on them. An influence of the macabre was of course part of the zeitgeist of the 1910s and 1920s, so it might simply be Lang living in is time and place.

Parts of the film are often called an adaptation of Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”, but really, there’s only a tiny bit of inspiration from the tale on screen when Medardus crashes Julia’s last party in a locked down Florence.

In general, there’s a mood of the eerie and the macabre running through the film particularly in its second half, a sense of supernatural doom hanging over its characters. Interestingly, Rippert realizes this mood without using many of the techniques of expressionism; Rippert is more of a naturalist, often positioning his astonishing number of bit players in large arrangements that amount to moving versions of picture puzzles, to be gawked at in the just as astonishing production design.

So, while this isn’t exactly a horror movie as we’ve come to know them, it is certainly of interest to anyone interested in the roots of the genre, like rather a lot of early silent movies.

Three Films Make A Post: A gripping puzzle of pursuit and escape

The Lurking Fear (2023): I’m not enough of an optimist to expect something like a Tubi adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s worst – though also fun despite of itself – stories to be much good, even though you could arguably make a nice ninety minute piece of pulp entertainment out of the material. What we actually get in Darren Dalton’s film is a bit of mock-POV horror, followed by long, long, long sequences of characters wandering through underground tunnels, disrupted by bad make-up effects and what the film laughingly calls its plot. Add to that an inability to edit action sequences or parallel plot lines – of different character groupings wandering through those damn tunnels, so don’t get too excited – that borders on the anti-genius (the Anti-Christ’s less fun brother), and not even Robert Davi playing a bad guy wearing a ridiculous hat can do much to save this thing.

Reportage November (2022): In some aspects this fake documentary style piece of POV horror from Sweden by Carl Sundström is a bit more competently made than your usual movie about filmmakers/ghost hunters/random fools walking panicked through the woods, wielding cameras. At least, the script seems to have a basic understanding of dramatic structure, so there’s a pleasant lack of scenes where characters just fart around, and the plot progresses in a reasonable and mostly efficient manner.

Of course, the narrative still only works like the filmmakers want it to because a quartet of supposed professionals acts ridiculously unprofessional, and most of it consists of the usual tropes and clichés of your typical wood wandering POV horror movie (without the green night camera, though), with a bit of a vague conspiracy angle pasted on. It’s still watchable, which is more than I’d say about many of its peers. Plus, at least the forests are Swedish for a change.

The Odessa File (1974): Ronald Neame’s Odessa File recommends itself mainly through its very post-War sensibility, a portrayal of an early 70s Europe that still lies under the shadow of the kind of people responsible for World War II. This makes it unpleasantly topical in a Europe where the Right is on the rise yet again. And like the Nazis here, there’s still the assumption of victimhood, the pretence at culture, and so on, and so forth coming from these people. The films hits the tone of parts of particularly German post-War culture and the things it liked to hide from itself rather well, so much so that its more contrived conspiracy elements as well as its general sense of paranoia feel plausibly grounded.

As a thriller, the film’s pacing tends to be a little slow, but once it gets going, it does develop more than enough drive to satisfy. The acting, with a merry mix of German and British actors playing the Nazis, and Jon Voight pretending to be Gerrman, as well, is strong throughout. Maximilian Schell hits the note of the whiny, self-satisfied mass murderer, particularly well.

In short: Where Are You, João Gilberto (2018)

Documentary filmmaker Georges Gachot follows the traces of German writer Marc Fischer’s book “Hobalala” in an attempt to finish what Fischer started: find and hopefully meet the great Brazilian musician João Gilberto. For the last decades of his life, Gilberto spent an eccentric and reclusive life, apparently living in hotel rooms and avoiding personal contact with anyone as much as possible, for unknown reasons.

On the trail of Fischer on the trail of Gilberto, Gachot meets various other key figures of Brazilian music history, encounters saudade as well as more European coded versions of sadness, loneliness and nostalgia, and ends up in front of a closed hotel room door listening to Gilberto singing behind it.

Obviously, this is quite different from your typical music documentary, particularly since Gachot often seems to go out of his way to avoid naming, dating or categorizing – if you want to learn about Brazilian music history, you’re wrong here. Instead, this is a film all about the feelings Gilberto’s music evokes in Gachot, Fischer and others, the feelings Fischer evoked writing about the absence of Gilberto as an actual person to be communicated with, as well as the sad beauty of music, not of its historical context.

This approach stands the film in good stead, as does Gachot’s ability to relate to everyone he interviews on a personal and specific level that feels grounded in a genuine appreciation for people with their foibles and eccentricities, as much as a love for Gilberto’s work and Fischer’s book.

That Gachot is also clearly one of those “poetic truth” documentarians makes me a little sceptical about the factual truthfulness of the hotel room door ending, but it’s so perfect an emotional capstone (even more so when you keep in mind that Gilberto himself would die in 2019, never making the big stage comeback and the albums produced by sensitive young fans he so richly deserved), factual truthfulness isn’t the point.

Three Films Make A Post: It Never Forgives Or Forgets

The House Where Evil Dwells (1982): A couple played by Edward Albert and Susan George (and their kid) move into a traditional little house in Tokyo. It was surprisingly cheap, but then, it is haunted by a trio of ghosts who have nothing better to do than to entice the couple and their best friend (played by Doug McClure) into a repeat performance of their own deadly love triangle from some hundred years ago. All of which does sound rather nice as an example of US/Japanese horror, particularly once you realize the film does actually utilize quite a few Japanese actors and locations. Unfortunately, whereas the film’s basic idea is sound, the script by Robert Suhosky and James Hardiman is tediously obvious, and lacks any even second or third hand clue about how Japanese ghosts and curses might work.

And Kevin Connor – usually great when staging scenes of Doug McClure punching rubber monsters and pirates – is a terrible director choice for a ghost story. There’s simply no sense of subtlety, nor any ability to build up the proper ghostly mood in the man’s toolkit, so all we get is goofiness and very little of substance or interest beyond the basic idea of the film.

The Black Tower (1987): This British short film by the somewhat anonymously named John Smith about a man being haunted by a building, the titular black tower that somehow follows him wherever he goes, on the other hand, is a brilliant example of how the techniques of experimental filmmaking can achieve a feeling of true, creepy weirdness. On paper, there’s very little to a film that consists of an off-screen monologue and shots that mostly show that black tower from various angles and in various surroundings, and some dislocating editing tricks, but in practice, this is one of the most effective treatments of the encroachment of true strangeness into daily live I’ve seen. That it also from time to time manages to be very, very funny indeed just adds to Smith’s achievement.

Im Schloß der blutigen Begierde (1967): But let us end our first post in this new October on a bummer, as is traditional in horror. This was initially supposed to have been directed by the great Jess Franco, and thereby acquired some members of Uncle Jess’s ensemble like Janine Reynaud, Howard Vernon and Michel Lemoine. Fate in form of the siren song of a Fu Manchu movie put Adrian Hoven on the director’s chair instead. As treated by Hoven, the film mostly consists of a series of scenes of characters babbling horrifying double entendres, having flashbacks, getting their kits off and from time to time committing acts of violence, all badly held together by your typical Gothic horror guff and flashbacks to former lives; also included are some real life operation shots, which the film treats as a big selling point.

Hoven is very good at aping the tedious side of Franco (or he can be tedious all by himself, I don’t want to be unfair to the guy), but brings little of the visual inventiveness, the obsessive energy, or the plain coolness of Franco’s filmmaking into play. For a film full of Gothic tropes, nudity and a bit of blood, this feels surprisingly boring and anaemic. The theoretically good stuff is there, but it is treated perfunctorily, without any drive or actual interest in it.

Three Films Make A Post: Watch Your Eyes!

Voice of the Eagle: The Enigma of Robbie Basho (2015): At times, this documentary about the great, weird acoustic guitarist, composer and esoteric stranger Robbie Basho by Liam Barker is very insightful, speaking with many of Basho’s surviving friends and companions, attacking the music from angles as varied as the artist’s ever-changing cultural interests. Those speaking about he music who didn’t know him do so with insight and love, having things of actual interest and meaning to contribute instead of soundbites.

Only two things mar the film: there’s no distance at all to Meher Baba and Sufism Revisited (the film even tends to call SR members “Sufis”, which is just wrong), which do straddle the line between cult and religion. And using a clearly ailing Country Joe McDonald and his dementia or Alzheimer-caused inability to remember things correctly as a sort of comic relief is just nasty and unpleasant in a way neither Meher Baba nor Robbie Basho would have approved of.

Il medium (1980): This is one of the last movies directed by the sometimes brilliant Silvio Amadio, and concerns clairvoyance, hauntings, potential possession and ghosts, all presented in a slow yet increasingly unhinged and irrational manner like only Italian filmmakers of the 60s to 80s knew to do. It’s not quite as mind-blowing as some of its siblings, and certainly doesn’t look as great as even Amadio’s own best films, but it does have the intense charm of watching a group of filmmakers (Claudio Fragasso is of course one of the writers) turning standard tropes and clichés increasingly strange.

Der Hund von Baskerville aka The Hound of the Baskervilles (1929): At least a third of this German silent adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s best Sherlock Holmes novel by Richard Oswald has been lost to the ravages of time and bad archival practices. The newest restauration and reconstruction uses still shots and synopses taken from censorship documents to fill the viewer in, and given the popularity of the book, and how much the first three of five acts where most of the missing material would be situated follows it, there’s little difficulty in following the proceedings.

Visually, the restauration looks fantastic, throwing Oswald’s expressionistically influenced staging into the proper shades of shadows, lights, weird angles, and improbably yet deeply atmospheric sets. There’s a lot to simply see and immerse oneself in here, as is only proper for the most Gothic of the Holmes tales.

The script does tend to get further away from the book the longer the film goes on, usually in less interesting and less effective directions, though everything ends in a pretty fantastic suspense set piece that also wasn’t in the book this way.

Grand Slam (1967)

Original title: Ad ogni costo

Retiring from his job as a professor at a Brazilian girl’s school, James Anders (Edward G. Robinson) goes to visit a childhood buddy of his, Mark Milford (Adolfo Celi), with a plan a lifetime in the making. On paper, the former academic has a complicated yet eminently feasible and thoroughly thought out idea for getting at a considerable amount of diamonds from a building right across from his old school. While the good Professor was teaching, Milford has become quite an exalted member of the mob, so he should be able to provide Anders with a specialized crew for the job.

In fact, Milford has an index catalogue worth of criminals on offer, sorted by keywords like “Playboy”, “Vatican”, or “Syndicate Killer”. So off Anders goes to instruct a military man (Klaus Kinski), a playboy (Robert Hoffman), an electronics expert (Riccardo Cucciolla) and a safe cracker (George Rigaud) in his plans.

Once in Rio, the Professor is mostly going to be hands-off, leaving his team to sort out various snatches in the plan – for example, it turns out seducing a Hollywood-frumpy middle-aged woman (Janet Leigh) is more difficult for our playboy than expected – and go through the old dance of shouty discussions and double-crosses without him.

Giuliano Montaldo’s Grand Slam is a somewhat typical example of the kind of crime and heist movie made as a European co-production – and therefore carrying a somewhat higher budget – that occurred pretty regularly in the latter half of the 60s. In this particular case it’s an Italian, Spanish and German co-production, but fortunately, the Italian side provides most of the behind the camera workforce. The money is otherwise well used in some globe-trotting location shots.

There’s the usual cast of European character actors and Hollywood stars on the downwards trajectories of their careers. All of them mix rather well here. Robinson nicely uses a certain grandfatherly quality to underplay how ruthless his character actually is. Leigh does more with the role of the seduced than you’d expect in this sort of thing. Everybody else is excellently cast to type, with Kinski for once not playing an outright psycho but a mostly calm, cool, and exceedingly dangerous professional, and he’s doing it rather well.

On the technical side, Grand Slam is utterly competent filmmaking that provides exactly the kind of suspense and the reversals of fortune you’ll expect going on in a satisfying and effective manner, without ever climbing quite the heights it should need for greatness. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, though it really leaves me with relatively little to write about.

Very little, that is, apart from the fact that Grand Slam quietly and off-handedly pulls no punches when it comes to showing how shitty our criminals actually are. The seduction plot most other films would play as a bit of a joke, for example, is deathly serious. Montaldo is very clear about the cruelty of this particular approach, and Leigh is only too happy to act accordingly. Because of this, the inevitable double crosses feel purposefully constructed to be such, instead of being a trope; and the film’s final, deeply cynical twist doesn’t come out of nowhere but is perfectly in keeping with everything Grand Slam taught us before about what kind of people we’re watching here.