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.

In short: Body Puzzle (1992)

Rich widow Tracy (Joanna Pacula) is having a bit of a hard time. Someone is sneaking around leaving her rather disturbing presents, things like a  human ear, a hand, or a “finger” (“it’s not a finger”), like a kitten gone bad. These body parts belong to the victims of a series of murders shaking the town. Apart from his habit concerning Tracy, the killer (François Montagut) likes to put a bit of Mussorgsky on his walkman while he’s working, so expect to hear the same bit of “Night on Bare Mountain” again and again and again.

Cop Michele (Tomas Arana) is on the case, yet despite the killer’s fixation on Tracy, he has a lot of trouble catching his man, or finding the bizarre secret behind the murders.

As a rule of thumb (there are of course obvious exceptions to this rule), the more time a giallo spends following a cop on a police procedural (but with everyone involved being pretty darn dumb) style investigation, the less enjoyable it becomes. Lamberto Bava’s Body Puzzle certainly is a pretty great example for this rule. But it goes even further to demonstrate it: while the scenes of the killer slashing his victims are generally entertaining enough (and sometimes even a little bloody), and those of Tracy being stalked by him are even downright suspenseful, whenever our hero Michele starts investigating – usually slowly and badly – the film turns into a void of utter boredom that suffers from the blandness of Michele, the general – there is one terrible gay stereotype which isn’t enjoyable but at least memorable – lack of distinction of the characters he interviews, and what looks like an inability by Bava to film these investigations in any interesting, stylish or even just economical manner.

Unfortunately, at least half of the film is taken up by Michele’s non-adventures, always slowing things down in the worst possible moment. This state of affairs is made even less interesting by the perfunctory romance between Tracy and our man Michele in scenes that feel so pointless and disinterested, I can’t help but ask myself if the producers strong-armed Bava into including them.


Of course, as this was made in the early 90s, long after the genre had faded away, it was certainly not easy for Bava to get a giallo made at all; going by the results, I’m just not sure it was worth his effort.

Universal Van Damme: Derailed (2002)

Secret - so secret we never even learn what organization he's working for - agent Jacques Kristoff (Jean-Claude Van Damme, obviously) has a very bad day in front of him. Not enough that his people take him off his birthday vacation to help the thief Galina Konstantin (Laura Harring, totally Eastern European) escape from Slovakia carrying some very secret loot she's selling to his people, a thing sure to anger his wife (Susan Gibney) and kids (Jessica Bowman and authentic Van Damme son Kristopher Van Varenberg) who think he's some sort of business person. No, additionally, the train Jacques and Galina escape on after Jacques explodes some cars is hijacked by international evildoer Mason Cole (Tomas Arana) and his goons, Jacques's family makes a surprise visit on the train and now thinks he's having an affair with Galina, and the very secret loot turns out to be an upgraded variation of small pocks that of course is set free when Jacques starts playing Die Hard on a Train, infecting everybody on board.

Fortunately, Jacques can shoot, knows That Kick, drives motorcycles on roofs of moving trains, and is totally honourable too.

Bob Misiorowski's Derailed, produced by Van Damme's own company in cooperation with the usual suspects (I really need to get around to computing the percentage of Van Damme films involving Boaz Davidson in some capacity), is how I imagine most people not as involved in actually watching these films imagine all Van Damme movies are: cheap, dumb, and full of the sort of ridiculous action movie cheese that either leaves you giggling happily or rolling your eyes a lot (I prefer the former). Van Damme rides a motorcycle on the roof of a moving train for gods sake, and when one of his henchmen tells Cole he fell off doing this, Cole's reaction does not contain words to the effect of "wait, he drove what where?"!

Because doing Die Hard on a Train alone would be a bit too boring (one can't fall behind the achievements of Steven "The Whale" Seagal, after all), somebody involved in the production had the brilliant idea to add disaster movie clichés to the action movie clichés in a gesture I can't help but find quite daring. Not surprisingly, Derailed's interpretation of the disaster movie genre is even more low-rent than that of the action movie (or is it the Die-Hard-alike?), so don't go and expect the one-note characters to be played by Hollywood stars past their prime, or George Kennedy (a man perpetually past his prime). On the other hand, the mild melodramatic contortions the film goes through with small pocks and train engines on fire do result in a complete lack of slack in the film. When Van Damme isn't kicking people in the face, there's guaranteed to be some sort of train problem, a Texan losing his shit over the small pocks outbreak, Van Damme's doctor wife doing heroic disaster movie doctor stuff, or something else to distract a viewer from the horrible emptiness of the universe and the cold glare of the stars.

Given this, you really can't say the film isn't working hard for its money (there are also unconvincing CGI and miniature effects to admire). Sure, it's dumb, sure, it spits on your notions of logic and gravity, but it's also lacking boring attempts at self-irony, and contains lots of scenes of Van Damme doing Van Damme things; though if you're coming for nearly nude Van Damme or ass-shots of our hero, you'll probably leave rather disappointed.

Be that as it may (and heterosexual me has seen JCVD nearly nude so often, I'm starting to get confused when he keeps his pants on), I know, it's only a cheap Die Hard rip-off with disaster movie elements, but I like it.

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