Three Films Make A Post: Their thoughts can kill!

Scanners (1981): This is sometimes treated as one of the lesser movies in David Cronenberg’s incredible run as a director from 1977 to 1996, but there’s so much to love in this version of the 70s conspiracy thriller as seen through the eyes of Philip K. Dick. Performances that are spot on or so weird they actually are spot on exactly because of their weirdness (Stephen Lack), a plot that starts in the realm of semi-plausible spy-fi but drifts further and further into the realm of the outright surreal, and a direction whose by now proverbial cool eye is all that stands between the material and utter, screaming lunacy. Plus, exploding heads are inherently cool (unless it’s your own head exploding).

Closed Circuit aka Circuito chiuso (1978): This Italian TV movie by Giuliano Montaldo does overstay its welcome a little, so that its turn from the locked room murder mystery to the outright fantastical doesn’t hit quite as hard as it could in a more concentrated form, but there’s much to recommend it: a clear love for the cinema experience of the time grounded in an ability to actually show the way cinemas at this time and place worked procedurally, a cast that has fun with the range of characters (all with secrets that have nothing to do with the case, of course) on offer, and the joy of seeing that most mock-rational of genres (as much as I have grown to enjoy golden age style murder mysteries, their ideas about logic and reason are utter nonsense) break down into the realm of the kind of fantasy that admits it is one.

The Kingdom of Jirocho aka Jirocho sangokushi (1963): This is the first film in the second cycle of films Masahiro Makino made about yakuza boss Shimizu Jirocho (Koji Tsuruta) – a real historical figure that had turned into something of a folk hero, and the embodiment of that most ridiculous of ideas, the good yakuza, honourably helping solve problems wherever he goes. This is really all set-up, showing the first meetings between Jirocho and the core members of his clan, but it does its business in such a light-handed and fun way, I hardly missed the presence of an actual plot.

Makino, apparently well-known for being a quick worker, clearly isn’t a sloppy one. Rather, there’s a lot of camera and character movement here, so much so, you’re never surprised when the protagonists break into song, as they regularly (though not quite regularly enough to call this a musical) do. There’s a joyous quality to the whole thing, unexpected from a film that finds a director repeating a greatest hit.

For fans of 60s/70s Toei ninkyo eiga – as I certainly am – there’s the additional joy of encountering a lot of the usual character and side actors, as well as a very very young Junk Fuji as a flirtatious bar maid (and alas not the female lead).

In short: Il fascino dell’insolito: La stanza numero 13 (1980)

An elderly professor (Tino Scotti) returns to a small town inn where he spent some time when he was a student. We will eventually learn that this was the place where he met, loved and left the great – only – love of his life, Assunta (Carmen Scivittaro), who died young and without him from an illness.

The professor is assigned room number fourteen; on his very first night, he is awoken by party noises from what at first appears the room next to his – number twelve – but which actually turn out to come from a room that hasn’t existed for a long time, room number thirteen.

This is the second adaptation of an M.R. James tale for the Italian series of short TV movies of the supernatural called “Il fascino dell’insolito”. Like the adaptation of “The Mezzotint”, I talked about before, this also takes James’s concise tale of a haunting and does something with it that has nothing whatsoever to do with style, tone, or theme of the original story. Here, there’s even less left of James, for where the TV Mezzotint was at least still a horror story at heart, this one uses the spookery exactly for the sort of things James objected against in ghost stories: it’s a friendly tale of an old man being forgiven for past misdeeds by the ghost of his former lover, with whom he’ll dwell forevermore happily in a mirror.

So as a James adaptation, this leaves rather a lot to be desired, what with the total absence of Jamesian wallops, the strange, or the macabre. As a supernatural tale standing in the tradition of the European Romantic era, it’s not half bad. Director Paolo Poeti manages to use relatively sparse sets and simple effects to create a considerable sense of place for the inn, a place populated by a handful of broad strokes characters given life by clearly experienced actors. I also like the way the supernatural encroaches, again with simple camera effects and some clever lighting – the print I’ve seen is in black and white, though my Italian isn’t good enough to tell if the series was actually shot this way – used with a degree of intelligence. That this isn’t really the kind of supernatural tale I enjoy, and certainly not one I’m looking for in a James adaptation, isn’t fully the film’s fault.

In short: Il fascino dell’insolito: La mezzatinta (1980)

Architect Marco (Sergio Fiorentini) gets into possession of a curious mezzotint of a stately Italian villa. It’s a haunted picture, indeed, for slowly but surely, it changes, showing how a hooded figure breaks into the villa, only to return with a little baby in its arms. After some time, the figure becomes clear enough so that Marco can see it is Death in female form. Other people can see the picture’s peculiar behaviour as well, so it’s not Marco’s admittedly somewhat fragile and melodramatic mind playing tricks on him during his midlife crisis.

The whole thing obviously deeply disturbs Marco, so much so, his obsession with the picture’s meaning puts an ever increasing strain on the relationship between him and his wife Lidia (Marisa Belli). Which, given his tendency to long monologues of self-flagellation and whining about “the times”, is already somewhat strained.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I though Mark Gatiss’s adaptation of M.R. James’s story “The Mezzotint” was the first and only time this tale was professionally adapted. Then, a fansubbed version of this episode from an Italian series of short TV movies of the supernatural and the fantastic came into my grubby hands, and I learned better.

Directed by Biagio Proietti, the film uses Monty’s story as a starting and ending point, making changes to some of the tale’s central details – for good thematic reasons in the case of the nature of the baby-stealing figure – and filling in the middle with some of the sort of heightened melodrama that thinks it’s Bergman but has rather a lot more to do with rich people whining about their so-called existential problems. Which would be perfectly fine, if the film also explained why I should care about Marco’s problems, or find what his incessant whining eventually leads to all that tragic.

It’s not a bad little TV movie, mind you. Fiorentini and Belli certainly put quite a bit of work into their portrayal of insufferable suffering, and whenever the film remembers its basis in a ghost story, Proietti actually manages to evoke some properly spooky moods. In between set-bound scenes, there are a handful of very atmospheric location shots in which Marco and/or the camera explore the surroundings of the creepy yet grand villa by night; some of the scenes of Marco just staring disturbed at the picture work just as well, creating a mood of desperation and dread you don’t actually get out of reading one of James’s more harmless stories. There’s also a fantastic electronic score that manages to keep the mood weird even when we return to monologues about our protagonist’s midlife crisis.

While I’m not too fond of the film’s thematic main direction, this is still a very interesting attempt at contemporizing the original story, showing at least some moments of fine filmmaking in the process, as well.

Three Films Make A Post: Some Live to Climb. They Climb to Live

Sherpa (2015): What starts as a bit of a picture postcard paean to the Sherpas – particularly the nearly record book touching mountain guide Phurba Tashi Sherpa - doing all the hard work for the hordes of hardcore tourists packaged by professional climbing businesses, turns serious after the great avalanche of 2014 kills sixteen Sherpas. Growing anger and frustration with the danger and exploitation inherent in the work lead to what’s really a strike movement. Director Jennifer Peedom raises to the unplanned occasion and turns out to be just as good at getting people who really aren’t into sharing their inner feelings to talk and to explain, showing how capitalism ruins everything – even the ability for some decent people to be honest to themselves - as she is at filming spectacular climbing scenes. Much of the film suggests the filmmakers truly care about the Sherpas and their situation.

The only element of it I’d criticize is its overuse of a clichéd and treacly emotionally manipulative score by Antony Partos that’s so over the top, it sometimes sounded like satire to my ears.

Slash/Back (2022): Nyla Innuksuk’s Inuktitut teen horror movie is a little wonder. Wearing some of its influences proudly on its sleeve – or rather, it feels like on its heart – it uses these influences to make the kind of horror film that has all the good qualities of local/regional horror filmmaking of decades ago. So expect the local applied to genre tropes, on one hand, to make both strange and new, on the other to be able to talk about things – here the lives and feelings and divisions between young Inuktitut girls living in the kind of small town at the polar circle where a solstice dance is pretty much the most exciting thing their parents generation experiences in a year.

Innuksuk touches her scenes with a light hand, never letting them getting swallowed by the horror tropes, but also never going the other way either. So things stay fun but never dumb, unless dumbness is point of the fun.

Alta tensione: Il gioko aka School of Fear (1999): The late 90s were not a good time to make horror or giallo in Italy. Still, Lamberto Bava did from time to time manage to get some money for a mini series anthology or two from Italian TV, like the series this fine TV movie is part of. It is often cleverly written (by Roberto Gandus and of course Dardano Sacchetti), using creepy kids tropes as well as a discomfort with conservative institutions to great effect, finishing ambiguous and dark, and surprisingly coherent.

Bava’s direction often creates genuinely suspenseful and creepy moods, usually finding some way to make every scene more interesting and effective. There’s also some fine locations work, which you don’t always get in TV work.

In short: Door into Darkness: Il tram (1973)

Original title: La porta dul buio: Il tram

The cleaner of a tram discovers the body of a murdered young woman half hidden below a seat. Commissario Giordani (Enzo Ceruscio), a young up-and-coming policeman with the habit of snapping his fingers rhythmically when he’s trying to think, is tasked with solving this puzzling crime. He quickly establishes who shared the last night tram with the victim, but his handful of witnesses seem to have seen or heard nothing whatsoever out of order, leaving the policeman with a murder taking place in front of multiple witnesses who didn’t actually witness it. It’s as if he had stumbled into a modern variation of a golden age impossible crime mystery.

Il tram is the second of four short movies in a 1973 Italian thriller (not quite giallo as we would use the term outside of Italy today) anthology TV show that was at least in part responsible for putting its writer, producer, as well as in this episode director, Dario Argento into the high profile, yellow-press alluring, rock star like popularity he had for a decade or two in his home country. From the here and now, I’m not completely sure why: the four movies are certainly good – particularly on a European TV budget of this time – and Argento is put front and centre via short introductions before each episode, but good filmmaking does not exactly turn a director into a star, and the intros don’t exactly present the mix of wit and shtick you’d get from Alfred Hitchcock. If you’re Italian and know what the special attraction was, please explain in the comments!

As an Argento movie, Il tram is actually an interesting little artefact, in many scenes – thanks to the budget – prefiguring his post Sleepless turn to forms of less visually dreamlike intensity. Here, after his early three giallos for the big screen, Argento is clearly a bit more enthusiastic about ways to still make naturalism sing to a stranger tune. While complex camera work is only in the cards for a couple of scenes, many of the sequences here are edited to a beat – the snapping of Girodano’s fingers and the rhythm of the tram are mirrored in the rhythms of the editing, not just helping to provide visual interest but also making a minimal plot with one single core idea and rather a lot of scenes of people talking lively and suspenseful. Until everything ends in a really tense stalking sequence that’s so Argento, you wouldn’t actually need to see his name in the credits.

In short: The Ogre (1988)

aka Demons 3: The Ogre

aka The House of the Ogre

Successful horror writer Cheryl (Virginia Bryant), her husband Tom (Paolo Malco) and their son Bobby (Patrizio) have rented a castle in Italy for some pretty special summer vacation time. Well, I say vacation, but Cheryl is so obsessed with exorcising her emotional demons via her writing, she’s still working rather a lot.

The family’s chosen vacation spot doesn’t seem to have been a great idea, either: once they have moved in, Cheryl begins having terrible nightmares and visions of a childhood encounter with a creature she identifies as an ogre. She becomes convinced these dreams are actual memories, and that the castle’s cellar is the place where she really did encounter something terrible back then. She does seem to have awakened something, for mildly strange things do start happening around her, even outside of her nightmares.

Tom, as is horror movie husbands’ wont in situations like this, is of course of little help, and acts in a way that would be less than helpful if Cheryl indeed had the sort of psychotic break he seems to suspect her to have, and is certainly not useful in case of actual monsters, even those perhaps conjured up by Cheryl’s subconscious.

The Ogre is another one of Lamberto Bava’s movies made for Italian TV. It isn’t one of the more exciting ones, going for a kind of psychological suspense with occasional monsters that neither Bava’s and Dardano Saccetti’s script nor the actors can really sustain.

Bava does seem to enjoy the opportunity to shoot in real locations for once a bit too much, so there are a lot of decidedly uncreepy shots of the very pretty castle, an much use of daylight and natural light that doesn’t play to the director’s strengths at all.

Some of the scenes of Cheryl creeping around the cellar or of the ogre doing his ogre business are fine, but the film seems more interested in the pretty castle and in Cheryl’s and Tom’s not terribly interesting rows to make much of those.

It’s all a bit harmless, and certainly lacks a scene or two of people getting killed via the power of golf.

The Prince of Terror (1988)

Original title: Il maestro del terrore

Warning: there’s no way to talk about the good bits of this one without some heavy last act spoilers!

Popular horror movie director Vincent Omen (Tomas Arana), dubbed “The Prince of Terror” by what I can only assume is movie Earth’s version of Fangoria, has an on-set falling out with his regular scriptwriter, Paul Hilary (David Brandon) and gets the man fired rather ruthlessly.

A dinner that very same night in the villa out in the sticks where Vincent lives with his wife Betty (Carole André) and his teenage daughter Susan (Joyce Pitti) is rudely interrupted by prank phone calls and a golf ball on the dinner table. Later, in an ever so tiny escalation, Susan finds her lapdog skinned in her bedroom. So everyone runs to their car and drives off to the next police station. No, wait, of course not. Rather, Susan cries, her parents shrug, and Vincent puts the dead dog into the trash.

Obviously, the dead dog is only the beginning of a night of terror. Vincent has apparently a gift for pissing people off, for Paul the angry writer has teamed up with an actor named Eddie Felsen (Ulisse Minervini) who was injured making one of Vincent’s films and is now your regular movie maniac. Together, they drive the family through various special effects horror set pieces Vincent once excised from Paul’s scripts. In-between, there’s ponderous yet nonsensical musing about the nature of horror, and the old “was it real, or not?” gambit repeated about a dozen times, until Vincent uses his golfing-based superpowers. Also, he might be the devil.

This is one of a series of four movies Lamberto Bava made for Italian television at the end of the 80s. He brought other Italian horror mainstays with him to the project, so here you get a script in the inimitable manner of Dardano Sacchetti (that is, it makes very little sense but seems to make a lot of it in the writer’s mind, and is all the better for it), a score by Simon Boswell, and effects by Sergio Stivaletti. Apparently, Italian TV was surprisingly okay with the gloopy gory bits you’d hope for from Stivaletti, so there’s at least that to look forward to for everyone.

Otherwise, this is certainly not on the level of Lamberto Bava’s best cinematic outings, but it is a fun enough movie once the viewer has decided to enter the proper mind space for its specific type of Italian horror, which means giving up on ideas of logic or proper causality and opening up to the random void, while holding back the parts of one’s personality that might want to watch this thing ironically. It’s not terribly difficult, actually, for Bava does know how to make his TV budget look surprisingly pretty, putting quite a bit of effort into making the the architecture of Omen’s home at once sexy and strange (or at least somewhat confusing).

I could have lived rather well without the whole “what’s true horror?” angle in the dialogue, though there are some peculiar lines in the English dub that will at least make the viewer ponder the nature of the drugs the writer was on (probably just wine, I know, I know). But then, Bava clearly wants to do some ratcheting up of tension like in a proper thriller, so the film needs its slow moments, structurally, and there’s little filmmakers like to talk about more than the philosophy of filmmaking.

The real meat of the movie is of course its insane climax, when Vincent first golfs Eddie’s brains out (seriously), then breaks Paul’s wrist – and apparently spirit – with a billiard variation on golf, and drives off with his family while Paul encounters Vincent’s supernatural powers beyond golfing. See the dead dog’s trash bag move! See Eddie move and puke out a stream of golf balls! Share Paul’s panicked sense of logical disconnect! Be happier than you were before seeing any of this (unlike Paul, who is now most probably dead)! And if that still isn’t enough, try to imagine this thing as a parallel universe sequel to The Omen, taking place in a world where Damien has become such a big Vincent Price fan, he stole his first name and went to Hollywood.

House of Lost Souls (1989)

aka Ghosthouse 3

Original title: La casa delle anime erranti

A gaggle of geology students – actor and character names don’t matter at all even though one of the female students has been diagnosed as a medium by her doctors – are trying to make their way out of the Italian Alps (I think) where they were involved in some sort of research project. Alas, exactly the rock falls they have been concerned about are making the roads back to actual civilization impassable.

Fortunately, there’s a hotel just a bit off from where the roads are blocked, so our intrepid heroes check into an ugly, somewhat brutalist building that probably hasn’t seen a new coat of paint since World War II. The proprietor is monosyllabic, rude, and somewhat creepy. He has good reasons for these character flaws though, for he has been dead for quite some time now, and is in fact just one of the vengeful ghosts haunting the hotel. In the coming nights and days, the number of geology students in Italy will shrink a bit.

By 1989, the once grand – if often bizarre – project of Italian horror was nearly over. Why, even old hands like Umberto Lenzi were lucky if they could at least get stuff like this TV (though at least cable style) movie under way. This time around, Lenzi brought his A game with him, which in my view of Lenzi (there are some of my peers who like his films in general quite a bit more than I do) means he avoided his tendency to bore and sprinkled the sugary deliciousness of non-sequitur craziness all over the proceedings here. The resulting film may be no Spasmo but it sure as ghosts provides the sceptical viewer with all the cheesy nonsense and the bizarre “why not” ideas she might wish for from this sort of things.

So the film is full of interesting dialogue you’ll already learn to love in the very early scene in which we learn that Italian physicians apparently diagnose people as mediums, features acting that fluctuates between the absurdly overdone and the just as absurdly deadpan and which is only made more bizarre by a dubbing track that is special even for English language dubs of Italian films, and presents the audience with a whole lot of nonsense Man probably Wasn’t Meant To Know.

The ghosts are of a rather hands-on type, preferring to kill their victims with knives, except for the Buddhist monk ghost who prefers making classic strangler hands – yes, there’s a Buddhist monk ghost, why do you ask? – and the little boy ghost who is really into telekinesis. All of ‘em really, really love decapitation so there’s are a lot of heads rolling/flying/going around. The film’s best/probably funniest scene presents a little boy being decapitated by a wayward washing machine, curiously enough not the only time I’ve seen a washing machine attack in an Italian movie; hopefully not the last time either.

Other demonstrations of Lenzi’s particular gifts can be found all over the film: there’s an hilariously awkward yet also kinda cool scene where diegetic music is at once the appropriate soundtrack to a murder and the reason the other characters don’t notice it (also featuring one of the female characters leaving the room in disgust – of the music and the company – snarling something about just getting her cigarettes with the loudest silent screw you imaginable appended). Or that moment when half of the characters are already convinced the hotel they’re staying in is a very dangerous place, yet some still stay behind there for no reason whatsoever while the rest goes on a fact finding mission in town.

Ah, they just don’t make stuff like this anymore, and in fact, they didn’t even make stuff like this anymore in 1989, so thanks, maestro Lenzi, for keeping the torch burning.