Three Films Make A Post: Witness the Beginning of Evil.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021): I was actually mildly excited about the Resident Evil world being put in different hands after about a hundred films by Mila Jovovich’s husband, but the resulting movie director/writer Johannes Roberts cooks up really isn’t a step up for the franchise at all. It’s a mess of a film that seems more interested in squeezing in as many videogame characters and nods towards various Resident Evil games as possible than constructing a working narrative, with way too many characters who have no reason to be on screen at all taking up run time as well as some of the viewer’s lifetime, the film cutting back and forth between these non-entities in a way that destroys the rhythm a big loud horror action movie like this desperately needs to work.

Instead of getting the adrenaline pumping, the film drags, then drags some more, and then drags again; the action sequences are staged without weight and feel random and inconsequential, and there’s simply no sense of tension to anything on screen.

The Beast aka The Wasteland aka El páramo (2021): This Spanish Netflix horror film by David Casademunt sets its sights rather a bit higher than Roberts’s film does, trying to talk about monsters and mental illness and frontier life and difficult families, all through the tale of a family that has fled 18th century wars into the wasteland (geographically and emotionally) of the film’s best title. I say trying, because like Raccoon City, it often lacks the focus it needs to succeed at its difficult task, though there are a handful of scenes in here that do produce the cold chill and the emotional complexity it so clearly aims for. The film’s main problem really isn’t only a lack of focus. There’s also Casademunt’s unsubtle direction, a tendency to overplay emotional beats and add a lot of slow motion and showy camera work in the tackiest manner imaginable exactly at those points when the film should trust its actors, namely Imma Cuesta and young Asier Flores, who both do what they can with what the film provides.

Devicansky Svirka aka Song of the Virgins aka The Maiden’s Tune (1973): By far the most artistically successful movie in today’s post is this fifty-five minute teleplay made in Yugoslavia when that country still existed. Directed by Djordje Kadijevic who also made the brilliant Leptirica/The She-Butterfly, this is a pretty incredible mix of early 70s arthouse sensibilities and the Gothic, a tale of psychosexual weirdness that is much better experienced than described which ends its very highbrow (and I mean that in a good way) tale with one of the greatest High Gothic scenes I’ve ever seen, the sort of thing that would have driven Poe-cycle phase Corman or even Bava mad with envy if they’d seen it, marrying sex and death and music in the most perfect way.

In short: Der Fluch der grünen Augen (1963)

aka Cave of the Living Dead

aka Night of the Vampires

A small town situated in what I assume is supposed to be somewhere in the Balkans is struck by a series of murders of young women. There’s something really strange going on there, for whenever a new victim is killed, the whole place suffers from a sudden and inexplicable loss of electricity. The corpses of the victims show a tendency to simply disappear the first night after they have been found, too.

When big time police inspector Frank Doren (Adrian Hoven) is sent to the village, he quickly learns that the villagers have their own explanation for the occurrences. Obviously, the vampire women living(?) in a cave in the area are at fault. Doren isn’t exactly a believer but the strangeness mounts up high enough he soon takes instruction from the village wise woman and begins to accept the idea of vampires. Why, perhaps the creepy Professor von Adelsberg (Wolfgang Preiss) living in the local castle with his black servant John (John Kitzmiller) and his assistant Maria (Erika Remberg) may have something to do with it all? Doren’ll investigates that one, too, for he has the creeps, I mean hots, for Maria.

There were only a handful of German horror movies made during the 60s, and usually, the spookiest German movies got was in the Edgar Wallace krimis. Hungarian director Ákos von Ráthonyi’s Der Fluch der grünen Augen (which would properly be translated as “The Curse of the Green Eyes”) is one of these few films, and once you’ve watched it, you just might be happy there wasn’t more of this stuff being made, for these are pretty dire proceedings.

Von Ráthonyi’s direction is as bland and visually boring as possible, far below the standards of the Wallace films and more on the level of the sort of local US production that is proud whenever a scene doesn’t use a nailed-down camera, or a Poverty Row movie directed by William Beaudine. During the vampire attacks (spoiler?), von Ráthonyi actually tries to use shadows and shots of snaking vampire fingers in the spirit of expressionist silent cinema but the attempts have such an amateurish and unconvincing air, I found myself cringing and waiting for the blandness and utter disregard for mood building to return.

The script is rather on the dire side, too, with barely anything of interest happening whatsoever, and most of that paced so as to be easily overtaken by a snail. The characters are one-note and bland and our supposed hero is an unsympathetic creep even by the standards of 1963, making grabby hands at every woman he encounters, something the film treats as an admirable trait. Not surprisingly, the treatment of Kitzmiller’s character, who acts like a child and speaks in the sort of accent a kid would come up with for that thing Germans are most afraid of, a black person, is pretty terrible too. To be fair, the film is down on the villagers treating the guy as if he were the devil himself, but its own treatment of the character isn’t much better, instead of horribly racist like the villagers ending up being pretty racist indeed. Which would be much easier to overlook in a film that has anything else to offer.


Alas, Der Fluch der Grünen Augen isn’t that film.

In short: Nocturno (1974)

On her deathbed, Jelena (Milena Dravic), the deeply beloved wife of Lucio (Rade Serbedzija), promises him to return to him from beyond the veil if only his will and belief are going to be as strong as hers.

At first, Lucio only seems to half belief this promise, but a combination of grief, his diet of Romantic verse and prose and spiritualist-affine philosophy slowly seem to turn desperate hope into conviction, until Jelena indeed appears to him. At first, she’s the proverbial figure in a shroud in a foggy graveyard, but soon, Jelena returns as human, touchable and feeling as she was when she was alive – at least to Lucio. The film does keep the reality of Lucio’s experience ambiguous at first, but soon provides the audience with facts – a piano playing Chopin despite Lucio not being able to play, a diary entry in Jelena’s handwriting made after her death – that become increasingly incontrovertible. Well, not for Lucio’s family doctor, but that’s not going to be the dramatic threat you might imagine it to be.

In fact, Branko Ivanda’s Yugoslavian TV movie is not terribly interested in putting Lucio into real danger of getting thrown into a 19th Century loony bin; these elements of the plot seem mostly to be there to in the end divorce the audience completely from the assumption we are witnessing a man’s grief-drive descent into madness, and to smuggle in some subtle commentary about the destructive force of the need to conform to societal pressures (probably not a good idea to make too obvious in Yugoslavia at the time) under the film’s main drive, discussing the dichotomy between a Romantic world view, belief and hope and a rationalism that here is portrayed mostly through Lucio’s pretty stiff and unkind doctor who is probably meaning well but not really showing much human emotion at all when confronted with the very human troubles in Lucio’s heart before and after the death of Jelena.


Despite some moody moments – the graveyard scene certainly being a highlight there – Ivanda’s film is not really a horror movie, but rather one that uses the fantastical to test out ideas and compare ideologies while grounding its philosophical questions in Serbedzia’s very human portrayal of a grieving man who isn’t quite sure if he’s losing his mind. It’s really a fantasy of hope whose philosophy of a positive irrationality and emotionalism standing against cold and empty rationalism is – like basically all of the handful of Yugoslavian and Polish (mostly TV) movies concerning themselves with the fantastic I’ve managed to see – very indebted to the Romantics, and not just when it cites Schubert, Chopin, and Byron. Of course, if you ask me, the nexus between the Gothic revival and the Romantics is the birth of much of what came after in fantastic literature (and later cinema) in the Western hemisphere, so the call-back is utterly fitting to what the director is doing here.

The Deserter

aka Devil’s Backbone

aka Ride to Glory

When US cavalry captain Victor Kaleb (Bekim Fehmiu) loses his wife in an Apache attack on a catholic mission, he holds his superior Major Brown (Richard Crenna) just as responsible for her death as the people who killed her. So, after an altercation with Brown that just barely ends with Kaleb deciding not to kill his superior, he deserts, going native in the desert bordering Mexico.

There he probably would have stayed, if not for the arrival of General Miles (John Huston) at Brown’s fort. Miles is convinced that the apache war chief Durango (Mimmo Palmara) is staying in the border countries of Mexico preparing an attack that would drench the whole Southwest of the US in blood – Native American and white alike. Of course, Miles can’t just waltz an army over the border of Mexico to try and stop Durango, and has decided on an alternative plan of attack. To fetch Kaleb – a man made for guerrilla war – give him a handful of men, and use him and these men to scout out and perhaps resolve the situation.

So Kaleb soon finds himself working for the US cavalry again, turning the obligatory rag-tag bunch of fighting men – among them his old Native American scout friend Natachai (Ricardo Montalban), British import Crawford (Ian Bannen), explosives-loving chaplain Reynolds (Chuck Connors), big angry black man Jackson (Woody Strode) and professional asshole Schmidt (Albert Salmi) – into an effective guerrilla force. Afterwards, the bloodshed starts.

Burt Kennedy’s The Deserter (going by the IMDB with directorial contributions of Yugoslavian Niksa Fulgosi, but I wouldn’t know) is yet another of those early 70s international co-productions – this time under the auspices of Dino de Laurentiis – that finds itself trying to mimic many elements of the Spaghetti Western, probably on a budget much superior to most anything Italian and Spanish productions companies who didn’t have a leg in Hollywood like Dino did could come up with. At the very least, there was enough money involved to lavish it on quite a cast of actors who mostly never quite made the big time but are – at least in my home – always a pleasure to watch. Bekim Fehmiu was quite the star in his native Yugoslavia and across Eastern Europe, though, and this film was a fruitless attempt to give him a foothold in Hollywood or at least Western Europe.

Of course, this being a de Laurentiis film, it then goes and doesn’t really do much with these actors, using a script that is decidedly one-note in characterisation, with the little character development that is there so underwritten it’s often difficult to make out why the film thinks the characters act like they act, or change when they do. Fortunately, the ensemble consists of men (and this is as much of a sausage assembly as you’ll ever find) quite used to, if they aren’t given much to work with, at least making the little they have count, always giving the impression the viewer is watching quite interesting people, even if there’s never anything visible on screen that would actually make them interesting.

Characterisation really is the weakest point of The Deserter’s script, though it is generally more serviceable than strong, providing a Man’s Adventure style men on a mission western. From time to time, writer Clair Huffaker – who was responsible for quite a few better scripts for westerns – does add some interesting flourishes to the proceedings, though. While the Apaches are the enemy of the day, and not given luxuries like characterisation or names, the film does more than once suggest that their grievances are very much justified. The film even, as much as a film very much in love with its own violence can, the way the conflict between Apache and post-settlers is fought: full of atrocities committed by both sides, one cruelty always leading to the next, with no side seeing itself in the position to ever stop escalating. Men of peace aren’t to be found on both sides anyhow, so the only thing they’ll use to resolve their conflict will be violence. Moral right and wrong don’t ever come into play. In the film’s world, a morally decent action can lead to as horrible consequences as a morally abhorrent one. In the very end, after quite a bit of slaughter, the film does suddenly start to argue doing “the right thing” might be important and worthwhile in itself even when the consequences are dire, but then it’s a bit too underwritten to really convince me of anything more than its good intentions. Which, come to think of it, is more than a lot of films bother with showing, so it’s still a point in The Deserter’s favour.

If you take the film for what it is, though, you can have a good time with it. Even though Kennedy is the archetype of a hired gun director never bringing any visible personal touches to anything he’s working on, he does his job well enough here, pacing things well, often letting the actors’ faces and the impressive landscape of Arispainia speak for themselves, getting the action done in professionally exciting manner. The resulting film is not exactly one of the greatest pseudo-Spaghetti Westerns ever made but it’s an entertaining time, if you can cope with a lot of unpleasant violence in your entertainment.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,american movies,yugoslavian movies,western,reviews,burt kennedy,bekim fehmiu,richard crenna,chuck connors,ricardo montalban,ian bannen,woody strode

Prokletinja (1975)

Most of Prokletinja's story is told via flashbacks starting during the inquest about the death of a man that is held in his shack somewhere out in the wilderness. The man - who like everyone else in the movie is nameless - had come to the place following rumours of a "Damned Thing", something invisible roaming the wilderness. He became increasingly obsessed with the thing, discussing its philosophical implications and the shattering of his beliefs it caused with a journalist he was friends with, until he finally was killed by it.

For pretty obvious political reasons, what with the notorious negativity and lack of "scientific reason" in the genre, there wasn't much horror produced in countries east of the Iron Curtain. Sometimes, however, as the slow dripping of fan-subbed TV productions from 1970s Yugoslavia suggests, filmmakers did have a bit of leeway to turn towards the darker side of the fantastic.

Prokletinja is director, screenwriter and actor Branko Plesa's (who is also playing the man holding the inquest) version of Ambrose Bierce's short story The Damned Thing. It's an hour-long TV movie, so Plesa probably did not have many resources to work with, but he does make fine use of what he had, namely the black and white (at least in the version I saw; I'm not sure if the film was actually shot in black and white) cinematography of Milorad Markovic and a darkly dramatic soundtrack by Stanko Terzic.

Terzic's soundtrack is predominantly used to impress the presence of the damned thing on the audience. There are a bit of fog, some growling and some moving bushes later on in the movie, for large parts of it, however, only the soundtrack, the expressions on the actors' faces and the threatening undertone of Markovic's nature shots are what create the monster in our minds. If you're an imaginative sort like I am, this method should work well for the movie and you, following the old adage that the most frightful things you can see in a horror movie are those things you don't see.

Plesa is more interested in the philosophical implications and in the world-view shattering dread the creature causes the film's main character anyway. As it stands, the Damned Thing's mere existence puts in doubt the nameless dweller in the wilderness's formerly scientific and orderly view of life, and suggests to him that the order of nature and mankind's position in it he believed in are just plain wrong. Worse, he may not like at all what he thinks has to take the place of the things he did believe in.

Aesthetically, Prokletinja rather reminds me of an arty Spaghetti Western turned Weird West (actually, I'm not sure if the actor's clothing are supposed to suggest the early 18th century US or Yugoslavia - it's not that important for the film at hand, I think, but I'd go with the former if I had to) Gothic horror. There are a lot of close-up shots of hairy, dirty-faced and obviously very poor men staring at a point beside the camera, and a dry, somewhat cynical humour of the type the Spaghetti Western genre and Ambrose Bierce shared; at other times, weirdly effective slowly swirling camera movement and slow-motion shots of animals that suggest the main character's new, horrific view of nature remind of something one of the Sergios might have shot in an especially philosophical mood.

If you like your obscure horror movies with a philosophical bend (and therefore more in tune with the classic weird tale as with modern ideas of horror), Prokletinja is a film to search out. It also makes me pretty curious about some of the other TV movies Plesa directed during the 70s. Hopefully, some daring fansubber will enlighten us about them one day (I sure don't think we'll ever get to see official releases of movies like these).

 

Technorati-Markierungen: yugoslavian movies,yugoslavian tv,reviews,horror,branko plesa

Sticenik (1973)

A young man (who will later turn out to be) named Michael flees in panic through the countryside, slowly followed by a strange figure wearing a cape. Let's call the latter "The Man" from now on. Ooh, symbolism.

Michael manages to escape to a large building, and right into the arms of a psychiatrist. Looks like the young man has stumbled into a clinic for milder cases of mental illness. The psychiatrist decides to take care of Michael for a time. Though the Man stops his pursuit once his victim has reached the clinic, the psychiatrist still catches a look of the strange pursuer and realizes that something is going on that's not quite right.

Nonetheless, talking with the young man makes it clear to the psychiatrist that his guest is in dire need of more than just physical shelter, and that his clinic is not prepared to help a man like him. But, before the psychiatrist can get Michael someplace else, he will have to win the young man's trust.

Michael's stay isn't quiet, though. There is something about the young man and his fears that disturbs the other patients terribly, as if his nightmares were somehow dripping into theirs, but that's not even the strangest thing about the situation. The Man hasn't give up on his pursuit, it seems, and starts to appear outside the clinic, or even on its roof, willing to use violence against people getting in his way. Later on, the Man accosts the psychiatrist when he is walking down a lonely country road and tries to convince the doctor that he is Michael's guardian, and has every right to get his hands on him, but the obvious strangeness surrounding the Man does seem to make his words rather difficult to believe.

Finally, the psychiatrist makes a decision. It never becomes quite clear if he decides to give Michael to the Man or just to transfer him into a more fitting clinic for his case as he says (who treats supernatural pursuit anyway?). In the end, the nature of the psychiatrist's decision will not be important at all, because Michael makes one all his own.

Yugoslavian (Serbian) director Djordje Kadijevic has quite a few films treating models of the literary fantastic in a very particular way in his filmography. Some of these films, like Sticenik, have fortunately found the interest of fansubbers, who are doing everyone interested in the cinema of the fantastic quite a favour.

Sticenik is based on a short story by Serbian Jewish writer Filip David, and achieves a strange, dream-like, yet precise mood of the inevitable. The film utilizes black and white pictures to reach a point (and a mood) lying somewhere between the type of Gothic achievable on a TV budget in Yugoslavia in 1973 and the clear symbolism of the more daring part of Eastern European arthouse cinema.

I find the work of directors like Kadijevic, whose ideas of what fantasy cinema is for and how it is to be made are very different from those of Western (and inevitably more commercial) directors, as fascinating as it is difficult to write about. Sure, I could give you an interpretative rundown, giving my opinion on what the Man symbolizes and what the rocking chair in the garden is a metaphor for, but this approach to writing about film (or any art at all) isn't for me, because it sells the actual experience of watching a movie short and turns movies into crossword puzzles with one clear solution that I'll tell you about to demonstrate my intelligence, leaving you with little reason to actually watch the damn things on your own other than to disagree with me or praise my awesomeness.

Some things are better experienced than explained, so I'll just leave you with my recommendation for Sticenik as a film that perfectly makes everything that is good and interesting about Eastern European fantastic literature as I know it come alive, and that's well worth seeking out.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: yugoslavian movies,reviews,djordje kadijevic,arthouse,horror