Three Films Make A Post: His acting will kill you.

Taken 3 (2014): You gotta hand it to Luc Besson and director Olivier Megaton, they really went out of their way to make Liam Neeson’s third adventure as uninvolving as possible, with a plot as predictable as the sunrise, but much less interesting. On the positive side, this time around, Liam’s female movie relatives aren’t kidnapped. Too bad the film’s alternative is to kill off Famke Janssen and have someone attempt to frame Neeson for it. The expected series of mild action scenes, a bit of waterboarding, and random melodrama ensues with little that’s thrilling or interesting to watch. The formula has grown stale, and neither Besson nor Megaton seem to have any interest in finding something interesting to replace it with.

But hey, at least the words “IT ENDS HERE” are on the film’s poster.

Chastity Bites (2013): John V. Knowles’s “Liz Bathory visits an American small town campus while working in the pre-marital virginity business” horror comedy, might not have Liam Neeson, or all that much of a budget, but it’s lively and the fun and funny moments highly outnumber its annoying ones. Plus, while it’s not completely original, it’s a film clearly trying to look at the classic elements it uses from its own place in time and space, subverting what seems fitting while keeping others in place. Plus, leads Allison Scagliotti, Francia Raisa and Louise Griffiths are, quite unlike Neeson, clearly putting energy and enthusiasm into their performances. I’m not too fond of the film’s more satirical parts because they tend to be built on the thing I like least in comedy – turning the kinds and classes of people the comedy writer doesn’t like into stereotypes so as to have an easier time making fun of them without hitting that pesky empathy in an audience – but for more than its running time than not, this is a fine little horror comedy.

Some Dollars for Django aka Drango: A Bullet for You (1966): I would not have pegged Paul Naschy’s frequent partner León Klimovsky as a very good Paella Western director, but the film at hand, while certainly not in the top of the Euro Western genre class, is a perfectly entertaining little thing, well-paced and energetic - which might be explained by Enzo Castellari supposedly having had a hand in the direction, but I tend to be very careful when it comes to this sort of thing. The film belongs to that part of the European Westerns that skews more to the classic US model of how such a film has to play out – just with added dubious dubbing, a bit more violence and torture and a much better musical score, of course – and even concerns itself with two very clear redemption arcs for its main characters. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t reach the heights of the best US Westerns there but it’s still pretty entertaining as well as showing Anthony Steffen and Frank Wolff in a particularly good week, the former expressing more emotion than usual, the latter making the most of the opportunity to for once be a bit more of good guy.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,american movies,spanish movies,action,horror,comedy,spaghetti western,in short,olivier megaton,liam neeson,famke janssen,john v. knowles,allison scagliotti,francia raisa,louise griffiths,leon klimovsky,anthony steffen,frank wolff

In short: Raise Your Hands, Dead Man, You're Under Arrest! (1971)

Original title: Su le mani, cadavere! Sei in arresto

After the end of the US Civil War, former confederate nurse Sando Kid (Peter Lee Lawrence), learns the manly arts of violence and joins "the Rangers", a law enforcement organization that may or may not supposed to be the Texas Rangers. Be that as it may, Kid is rather good at his job and shoots down evildoers wherever he goes, ritually handcuffing the bodies of his victims, mumbling nonsense about the letter of the law. Is he a future serial killer? A closet necrophiliac? We don't know.

As an interesting holiday project, Kid travels to Springfield, his old hometown, where he pretends to be a dandyesque perfume salesman, and begins to put his nose and his gun into the business of local bad guy Lee Grayton (Aldo Sambrell), a man whom Kid once met when he was a Union officer with a love for killing wounded enemies. Grayton is trying to acquire a lot of land in the area to get control over a planned railroad line, and if the owners don't want to sell, his men have rather convincing arguments made of lead. Until Kid's arrival, Grayton's life of terrorizing the town, dominating the local sheriff and banker, and bedding saloon owner Maybelle (Helga Liné) has gone swimmingly.

Kid, however, is pretty good at making Grayton's life deservedly difficult, and Grayton's men rather dead, particularly when he partners up with crazy bounty hunter Dollar (Espartaco Santoni). In the end, it's really never in question who will win the final showdown.

And there lies the greatest weakness of León Klimovsky's Spaghetti (paella?) Western, a film the puts the "generic" in genre, with never a moment on screen one hasn't seen in tenser, more complex, or just more interesting form in a different movie, preferably with slightly more charismatic actors. This is the sort of film where the only surprise is how easy it will be for someone even only slightly knowledgeable about Spaghetti Westerns will be able to predict the how, why, and when of every single thing that's going to happen.

The only actual surprise in Raise Your Hands is how harmless many of the usually cynical and grim basic elements of the Spaghetti Western feel here. Somehow, Klimovsky manages to even stage a scene like Maybelle's death, that is, one where a woman is beaten to death, so that it feels harmless instead of bitter, or shocking, or just misogynistic. Not that I'd be really keen on this last mood, rather the opposite, but at least it would be a sign someone involved was trying to give the film a bit of personality, instead of the nothing that seems to be at its core.

Having said this, I also have to say that I found Klimovsky's movie not painful to watch at all. The frequent Paul Naschy partner is a perfectly competent Western director, keeping things empty but pacy. It's just too bad I'll remember nothing but a feeling of dissatisfaction about Raise Your Hands in a week or two.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spanish movies,in short,spaghetti western,leon klimovsky,peter lee lawrence,aldo sambrell,helga liné

Satan's School For Ghouls: El Mariscal Del Infierno (1974)

aka Devil's Possessed

aka Marshall of Hell

This October, the agents of M.O.S.S. are digging deep into the heart of Halloween, taking a look at films about demons, the devil, and every kind of fiend (except US presidents and presidential candidates). You can find our collected annals of evil here.

Speaking of the devil, what would our old friend Satan be without worshippers? And how awesome would these worshippers be if they were played by Spanish super-wolfman Paul Naschy? Actually, not very, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

It's the middle ages. War hero baron Gilles de Lancré (Naschy) feels his influence on the king dwindling, and decides to concentrate even more than before on his true interest: finishing the Great Work of alchemy, so that he can afterwards replace the king (man why doesn't the guy trust him!?) and rule the world. So let's hope for him that Great Work isn't meant quite a metaphorically as some scholars believe.

Gilles's mad plan is driven on by the occultist (and con-woman) Georgelle (Norma Sebre). The two are lovers with quite a Macbeth-ish relationship, for when Gilles's pet alchemist (and Georgelle's co-con-person) tells him he needs virgin blood - and lots of it - to finish the Work, she's the one talking him out of his mild attacks of conscience ("Even more murders!?"). And she's right, too - surely, there can't be nothing wrong with sacrificing young women to Satan? Though it has to be said the film awakens doubts about Gilles's understanding of the word "virgin", seeing as how the way to the sacrificial altar seems to begin in his bed; at least if he's not inconvenienced in the act by an epileptic fit.

So Gilles begins a reign of terror among his serfs, kidnapping and killing young women and bleeding everyone else financially dry to finance the alchemical experiments. He's so enthusiastic he earns himself the nickname "the Marshall of Hell". But even medieval serfs can only take so much, so Gilles soon has a small peasant revolt going on. The serfs' leader, however, is quite easily captured and gotten rid of. Things change when Gilles's old war buddy Gaston de Malebranche (Guillermo Bredeston) comes home from time spent as prisoner of war. Even though the two men were fast friends, Gilles's and Georgette's love for tactically catastrophic violence soon turns Gaston into the baron's most dangerous enemy.

After a failed attempt on his life, Gaston decides to seek out the remnants of the resistance against his former friend, and soon enough turns what had been the demotivated shells of Gilles's enemies into a sub-chapter of Robin Hood's Merry Men. I'm sure Satan would help Gilles out if he actually existed inside of the fictional world of the film, but as it stands, all hope seems lost for the cause of evil, even though Gilles still has a few tricks up his sleeve.

When I started with my films for this October's M.O.S.S. project, I didn't suspect how difficult it would be to set eyes on films that actually contain the devil, demons, or at least supernatural fiends outside of their marketing material. Il Mariscal is not the film I was looking for, for what tries to look for all the world like a horror film variation of the career of Gilles de Rais, is at its heart a rather lame and tame swashbuckler whose bad guy just happens to sacrifice "virgins" to Satan.

Apart from this core disappointment, the film suffers from all the typical Naschy weaknesses: important, possibly exciting plot developments are talked about rather than shown (the build-up of the rebel army - happens off-screen; that first rebel leader - captured off-screen; and so on); a dubious sense of the way time works; a lack of production values that leaves most sets nearly empty; Naschy's obsession with trying to make his bad guy characters look sympathetic by having them whine a lot about what poor dears they are, which is a bit difficult to buy when talking about a character who mass rapes and murders women. Not that we'd actually get to see much of the depravity, because, unlike most of Naschy's films, this one is rather lacking in nudity and gore to help keep the audience awake.

For most of its running time, the film also lacks the secret weapon that keeps many of other Naschy's other films that share Mariscal's flaws at least watchable, often even brilliantly entertaining: an endearing love for the wrong-headed, the bizarre, and the improbable. Naschy's love for these things seems absolutely stunted in this outing, with little happening on or off screen that I wouldn't call quotidian.

I'd be less down on the film if it were any good as a swashbuckler (after all, "Robin Hood versus Satanists" sounds rather great, doesn't it?), but the swashbuckling is so rote and charmless it's impossible to get excited about it. It doesn't help the film's case how little visual imagination Naschy's regular collaborator León Klimovsky brings to the table here. Everything is very brown and slow and realized without passion, as if no one was even trying to let the film look like anything other than a handful of people in school play medieval garb waddling through brown, depopulated locations and sets without a designer. Just look at the so-called tourney with two horses and twenty guys standing in a row in the middle of nowhere and despair!

Among Mariscal's few positives is an expectedly melodramatic and physical performance by Naschy (his antagonist Bredeston is unfortunately not Errol Flynn, or even Richard Harrison). Naschy-the-actor really gets into his character's increasing mental deterioration; unfortunately, Naschy-the-writer doesn't provide him with much of interest to do. The final fight between (a stuntman clearly standing in for) Naschy and Bredeston is also relatively remarkable, with much better choreography and execution than anything that happens before it. In fact, if the rest of the film's action were of this standard, this could have been a rather more decent swashbuckler than it actually is.

That final fight is also the only point where the film does something actually surprising and interesting. Despite all genre conventions and being the designated noble hero of the piece, Bredeston loses the fight against his enemy, and it's the job of the peasant rebels to shoot the enemy of virginhood with arrows. This scene is staged as the only moment of true Naschy weirdness in the movie, with Naschy ranting about the awesome power the devil has provided him with, and the rebels just shrugging and turning him into a porcupine; the working classes finally asserting themselves.

Technorati-Markierungen: satan's school for ghouls,reviews,spanish movies,argentinian movies,paul naschy,leon klimovsky,norma sebre,guillermo bredeston,adventure,horror

Assignment Naschy: A Dragonfly For Each Corpse (1974)

Original title: Una libélula para cada muerto

A black-garbed and red-trousered killer strolls around Milan, killing addicts, prostitutes and lovers of kinky sex, leaving an artificial dragonfly with each corpse. To prove himself after a never explained case that went spectacularly bad, sadistic, mean-spirited cigar-chomping Inspector Paolo Scaporella (Paul Naschy) is put on the case. Scaporella - whom the film first shows threatening a flasher with death the next time he sees him - seems not too excited about the prospect, for he thinks the victims are getting exactly what they deserve. But it's a job, right?

Scaporella's actual investigation plays out with him not doing much for a while, except getting his wife Silvana (Erika Blanc), who is clearly the brains of the marriage, interested in the case and using a dinner party to a) learn that the dragonfly is a Chaldean symbol to mark "degenerates" and b) put a friendly gay fashion designer to finding out who made the special button he found with one of the victims. The latter will - quite unlike anything Scaporella is going to do - be important later on, but until the film reaches that point, it's scenes and scenes of our "hero" walking around chomping on his cigar, getting pascha-ed by his wife and beaten up by nazi bikers while following up clues that won't actually be important later on. Once the audience really has enough of that, the killings finally reach the inspector's friends from that all important dinner party. There's just enough time for Silvana getting close to the truth and herself in danger before Scaporella understands what's going on.

Directed by Paul Naschy's frequent collaborator León Klimovsky, Dragonfly is the duo's attempt at fusing the Italian giallo and the Italian cop movie by combining both genre's worst traits into a single, meandering piece of reactionary boredom.

So we get the silly mystery full of holes and the loosely structured plot typical of the giallo without much of the genre's visual panache; we get the cop film's hatred of everything and everyone who is different without much of its hatred for large-scale corruption, its often conflicted view of its cop heroes or its exciting action scenes.

Naschy's Scaporella is clearly set-up to be the shining hero of the piece. Yes, the audience is supposed to admire a guy who lets a wounded gangster he's going to arrest crawl to his car on his wounded leg, and who only sees "degenerates" deserving of death in addicts, prostitutes and people who like utterly innocent things like threesomes and necrophiliac role-play. If you see a clear opportunity for the film to explore some rather interesting points about how close its supposed hero and its villain are, then you're a lot cleverer than Naschy's script - like he does with everything potentially interesting in it, Naschy decides not to explore that aspect to put in another scene of himself being shirtless, as if you couldn't combine these things perfectly in some sexposition if you wanted to.

Another of the film's problems is that its ideas of what's "degenerate", and its way of showing them off is painfully behind what the Italians did and unpleasantly reactionary. Where even the most suspect giallos are so gleeful in their depiction of sex and depravity (or "depravity") that it's usually impossible to tell if they are in awe of or looking down on it (I usually suspect them to do both at once), Dragonfly really is so little into that sort of thing that it shows nearly none of it in an interesting way, leaving me neither shocked by the depths of human depravity as I'm clearly supposed to be, nor titillated as I'd have liked to be.

But even if you ignore these problems and flaws, Dragonfly just plain doesn't work as a mystery or a crime film. I could live with the ridiculousness of the set-up, but Naschy the writer is not someone able to produce the tightness of script that would be the only thing able to save the film. It's all wandering around and Naschy showing off how awesome he is without ever actually being awesome. Our supposed hero really comes off as a particularly dense bully who should listen to his wife more (even when she calls that thinking he never does "women's intuition"), stumbling through a case that's just not all that interesting.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,giallo,mystery,reviews,paul naschy,leon klimovsky,erika blanc

Assignment Naschy: Dr. Jekyll Y El Hombre Lobo (1972)

aka Dr. Jekyll versus The Werewolf (and variations thereof)

After having a little party with their friends, including a certain Doctor Jekyll (Jack Taylor) who doesn't like to be reminded of his grandfather, aging industrialist Imre Kosta (José Marco) and his freshly married wife Justine (Shirley Corrigan) are off to a most romantic honeymoon. The loving couple visits rural Hungary to let Imre breathe the air of the land of his birth and give him an opportunity to visit the graves of his parents - that's what all people do on their honeymoon, right?

The local villagers warn Imre off from going to the old graveyard where his parents lie buried, for the area is infested with murderous bandits and opportunity rapists, and the castle next door is supposed to be inhabited by a monster, but the industrialist, being a man of the world, takes it all for superstition and nonsense. It turns out that we're witnessing darwinistic principles at work here. After visiting the graveyard, Imre is knifed to death by a trio of the non-existent bandits, and Justine's life is only saved with the help of a barrel-chested man dressing like a French existentialist novelist. Hello again, Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy), the world's most frequent werewolf. Waldemar - no slouch even when he's not wearing a face full of fur - kills two of Justine's attackers and takes the - by now fainted - woman to his castle where he lives with the local leper and an elderly woman the villagers take for a witch.

After the expected hysterics, Justine just as expectedly falls for the irresistible manly and tragic charms of Waldemar (yes, of course this was scripted by Naschy), even when she learns of his curse; things seem to go well.

Alas, the last surviving bandit is a very bad loser with highly dubious ideas of right and wrong, and begins to obsessively plan Waldemar's demise. The jerk's first plan of attack only costs the lives of some more bandits when he happens to learn that trying to kill a guy you know to be a werewolf on the night of the full moon is a pretty stupid idea. The jerk's second plan is a bit better - not attacking on the night of the full moon, beheading the old woman, and exciting the whole village into a state of torch-wielding mob-dom to do his dirty work for him.

Despite these dangers (and thanks to the modern commodity we know and love as the motorcar), Waldemar and Justine escape to London. There, Justine tells her friend Jekyll all about Waldemar's little werewolf problem, hoping for help.

Although Jekyll is pining for Justine himself, he's putting an honest attempt into helping Waldemar, quite to the disgust of his assistant Sandra (Mirta Miller), who for her part is a) pretty mad and b) pining for Jekyll. The doctor has a fantastic plan to cure Waldemar, too. Just wait for the night of the full moon, pump the man full of the serum that turned Jekyll's grandfather into Mister Hyde, wait until "the absolute evil kills the wolfman", and inject Waldemar with the antidote to the serum Jekyll invented killing off (off-screen, in the past) dozens of guinea pig patients. I can't imagine what could go wrong.

As you will have realized by now, Dr. Jekyll Y El Hombre Lobo is - in a different version of the usual structural eccentricity all scripts written by Paul Naschy I've encountered thus far feature - a film of two very different halves that do suggest an interesting production history to me, what with them being of so very different style and content. The first one is a slightly silly, yet very atmospheric piece of neo-gothic filmmaking that shows off director Leon Klimovsky's talents at more than just racking the zoom lens.

This part of the film is dominated by moody shots of an atmospheric winter landscape (with only a little snow), and is blessed with a modernized version of the play of light and shadow that's so important for everything gothic even in a film that doesn't take place in the olden times. There's also a surprising narrative consistency to the film's first forty minutes. Scenes flow into each other in a manner that makes logical and narrative sense, all important scenes are actually happening on screen, and for once, Naschy's script even manages to convince me that Waldemar is a somewhat tragic figure. The latter may very well have something to do with the simple fact that Waldemar's attempts at not killing random people when he wolfs out seem less half-hearted this time around.

Then, quite abruptly, the film's style and content change. Neo-gothic turns into mock-psychedelic, Spain in winter standing in for Hungary turns into some classical "look, we actually carted Paul Naschy to London for two days" scenes and some not very interesting looking sets, while the not exactly clever, but up to this point at least coherent, plot turns into raving lunacy of the sort that may be inspired by late period Universal movies or poached from the scribbling of an overexcited twelve year old boy. I'm not complaining about it, mind you. As much as I would have liked to watch a Naschy wolfman movie that is coherent yet still good, I won't ever complain about a film turning this delightfully strange.

I can't help but admire the absolute, beautiful wrong-headedness that leads to Paul Naschy playing a wolfman and Mister Hyde - for no good reason but tradition dressed like the Fredric March version - in the same film, as if these figures weren't different sides of the same archetype anyway. As nobody who has ever witnessed Naschy's werewolf performances will doubt, the man plays his Hyde scenes with great relish and enthusiasm.

Our man's script for its part attempts to cram variations on all of Hyde's traditional misdeeds into about fifteen minutes of misdeed time, with a high degree of success. It's as if Naschy and Klimovsky had decided to not just give their audience two films for the price of one but to also cram both films as full with fun stuff™ as they could in a technique that reminds me a bit of the wild abandon of 90s Hong Kong cinema. Sure, this way the pair had to leave sense and coherence behind in the end, but who wants coherence when she can have scenes of Paul Naschy with grey make-up and yellow eyes strolling through early 70s London dressed like a Hollywood Victorian, and nobody around him caring?

If my explorations of Naschy's work have taught me anything, then I surely don't

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,reviews,horror,paul naschy,leon klimovsky,shirley corrigan,jack taylor,mirta miller

Assignment Naschy: La Noche De Walpurgis (1971)

aka The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman

aka Werewolf Shadow

Students Elvira (Gaby Fuchs) and Genevieve (Barbara Capell) are travelling rural France in search of traces of Countess Wandessa de Nadasdy (Patty Shepard), of whom legend tells she was a vampire keeping herself young with the blood of female victims until one of her lovers staked her with a very special silver cross.

Near the rumoured resting place of Wandessa, the girls' car runs out of fuel. Fortunately, dapper wolfman Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy) has been revived at the beginning of the movie and is now at just the right place to play helpful gentleman for our heroines. Waldemar is inviting the ladies to spend the weekend at his place, where he lives alone with the mad sister (Yelena Samarina) he fails to mention. What woman can resist the barrel-chested charmer?

The weekend at casa Daninsky is pretty interesting. Though Daninsky's sister repeatedly tries to throttle the girls or just warn them away (she's not very consistent), Elvira falls for the irresistible piece of manliness known as Wally to his friends (a fact I may or may not have made up) even though she has her own piece of manliness, policeman Marcel (Andres Resino), waiting for her at home. But oh well.

Waldemar has been searching for Wandessa, or rather the cross she was killed with, himself, for it is the only weapon that can kill him for good, an ending he very much craves. With the girls' help, he is finally able to locate Wandessa's grave. Including a body with a silver cross poked into her chest and all. Would you believe that pulling out the cross is a rather bad idea, especially when Genevieve then proceeds to accidentally bleed on the corpse?

Before you can say "uh-oh", Genevieve gets vamped up herself. Even worse, soon will be Walpurgis Night and terrible things™ will happen then. Looks like Waldemar has to add the "fearless vampire killer" title to that of werewolf and stud.

After I successfully enjoyed Paul Naschy's first Waldemar Daninsky movie, I turned towards La Noche De Walpurgis, which is supposed to be one of the best of the Daninsky films and definitely was the most commercially successful in the series.

The film is directed by Naschy's long time collaborator Leon Klimovsky, who made quite a few genre films with and without Naschy, some of them pretty great, some of them pretty horrible. On which side of that divide La Noche falls will depend largely on a given viewer's tolerance for a script that is weirdly paced even for a European horror movie from the 70s.

Naschy and/or his co-writer Hans Munkel don't seem to have much of a clue how to pace a narrative properly at all. Scenes without much of a function in the narrative go on way too long, other scenes that would actually be helpful to build a proper narrative are left out completely and are later related in static dialogue scenes (suggesting some budget trouble, too), stuff happens in stops and starts without any sense of rhythm, and often with complete randomness. Time, too, seems to run quite differently in Naschy-land, the full moon seemingly shining whenever it is convenient. Seen in the wrong state of mind, all this could be enough to make one despair.

But between the tedious, the boring, and the draggy, the film sandwiches pearls of wrong-headed beauty and peculiar ideas no director or writer in his right mind would attempt to put on screen, presenting them with an earnestness that is at once utterly silly and admirable. The film's interpretation of the female (slightly lesbian) vampires alone would be worth the time spent watching. Vampires in this film, you see, have some of the powers movie vampires usually don't take from Stoker's Dracula, like the ability to just squeeze themselves through the slightest openings (never shown here, but clearly happening), but they are also fit with ridiculously fake fangs that permanently dig into their lower lips (must become pretty uncomfortable over the years), and only move in slow-motion. The latter is an idea demonstrating the genius and horror of La Noche at its most typical. Slow motion is certainly a way to make one's vampires look and feel more otherworldly and dream-like than the more animalesque or glittering versions most filmmakers seem to prefer do, but as it is realized here, it's also - and at the same time - just a very silly thing to watch.

"Just a very silly thing to watch" is a description that fits large swathes of the movie, at least those parts of it that aren't painfully boring. However, it is a silliness that carries with it moments of great artistic success when Klimovsky suddenly manages to stage a scene that's just as atmospheric as it is silly (for example Waldemar's fight against the undead Genevieve, gravity be damned). Furthermore, as confused and technically problematic as Naschy's script is, it is confused and technically problematic in a very individual way, as if Naschy had decided to give his audience a look into his unfiltered unconscious, logic, structure and narrative technique be damned. If there's another explanation for a film that is supposed to be a pulp horror movie about a werewolf squaring off against a female vampire turning out as strange as La Noche De Walpurgis does, I don't have it. In any case, I did enjoy this second film in my reacquaintance with Naschy's body of work a lot, at least when I wasn't bored by it.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,horror,reviews,paul naschy,leon klimovsky,patty shepard,gaby fuchs,barbara capell