Andrzej Wajda: Master of Gore

Made in 1974 under a Communist regime, Ziemia Obiecana (Promised Land) is a sweeping portrait of capitalism on the rise in late-19th century Poland directed by Andrzej Wajda, arguably that nation's greatest director. In some ways it looks like Wajda's attempt to imitate the opulent yet socially conscious work of the Italian director Luchino Visconti, or a companion piece to another Italian epic, Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900. I'll have more to say about the film as a whole this weekend, but for now I have to report the shock I experienced, and wish to share with you, when I discovered, in the midst of this highbrow project, one of the most horrific exhibitions of cinematic gore I've ever seen. You won't have to wait long if you watch the clip below, which was uploaded to YouTube by polskietodobore; the worst is over in less than a minute. To set things up, a factory executive is attacking an employee whom he suspects is out to blackmail him. But the whos and whys won't matter for long once the two men tumble into that wheelwell. Just remember to remind yourself: "It's only socialist realism....It's only socialist realism...."



That's the sort of moment that might mark another movie, or at least one from the capitalist world, as a genre product not to be taken seriously. And some may well feel that Promised Land can't be taken very seriously after such a display, while some of those more intrigued by this sample might find themselves disappointed, despite another factory mutilation scene and a nice man-on-fire bit later, in a film that's much like a densely packed 19th century novel. Does such a scene discredit the artistic aspirations of its director, or can there be a point to it that wouldn't compromise Wajda's artistic integrity. Since one might presume that there'd be no such thing as exploitation cinema in a communist country, we probably should assume the latter, but I'll save my own judgement for later. For now, to reiterate: damn......

George A. Romero's SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (2010)

On the DVD, George A. Romero explains that his sixth "Dead" film can be seen as the second film of a trilogy that is already complete. This second trilogy begins chronologically with the second film released of the three, Diary of the Dead, and ends with the first film released, Land of the Dead. They have a character, or at least a performer, in common: Alan Van Sprang, who plays "Brubaker" in Land, an unnamed Colonel who hassles the video crew in Diary, and the same character promoted to the lead in Survival. The new film includes a flashback establishing "Nicotine" Crockett as the same character we saw in Diary, though he's somehow been demoted to Sergeant since then. Sometime in the future, presumably, he'll change his name to become the character glimpsed in Land. This is all very interesting to know, but it isn't essential to appreciating or critiquing Survival, since Crockett is more or less a straight man for his fellow soldiers and the people he encounters on Plum Island, Delaware.

In a way, Survival is a reversal of Day of the Dead, with military folk as the relatively sane ones entering a domain of madness. The similarity extends to an island clan's efforts to tame and train their zombified relatives. That clan, the Muldoons, have driven their old rivals the O'Flynns off the island because patriarch Patrick O'Flynn took a zero-tolerance approach to zombies and the infected. O'Flynn goes online to lure survivors from across the country to Delaware, where he expects either to recruit them for the retaking of Plum or simply to roll them for wealth and weapons. After attempting to ambush Crockett's little band, O'Flynn ends up their ally as the soldiers discover the atrocities committed by the Muldoons. It becomes obvious soon enough that there are no good guys on Plum, except perhaps for O'Flynn's estranged daughter, whose survival after her father's exile is thrown into question.

More than ever for Romero, the zombie threat is just a McGuffin here, a backdrop for a feuding-patriarchs storyline very reminiscent of The Big Country, especially in its conclusion. By now, Romero is clearly having a hard time taking the zombies seriously. They're as gruesome as ever when they make their customary final rush (and when Romero reverts to practical gore effects after economizing on CGI blood earlier), but too often he makes them objects for sight gags. One is shot in the chest by a flare gun; for some reason that ignites its head. Another is force fed from a fire extinguisher until its eyes pop out of its head.

But at the same time some zombies become figures of pathos or a kind of gothic awe. A female zombie on horseback rides through the landscape like a figure out of folklore; the effect is eerily thrilling rather than horrific. But the story is less about the Dead than about the foibles of the living, with a moral Romero drives home with overkill (literally, you might say) in an editorializing, superfluous coda.

Romero's second trilogy doesn't compare with his first, but Survival is a big improvement on the hamfisted Diary, which wasted our time making Romero's who-cares point about our modern obsession with recording ourselves. If Survival doesn't really function as a horror film, despite some chilling moments and excellent exploitation of a dread-inducing landscape, it works for me as a pulpy adventure story with a slight accent of Celtic exoticism and an ensemble cast that performs with guileless conviction. The dialogue is often on a comic-book level, but the actors sell it sincerely, especially Kenneth Welsh as O'Flynn, a figure of malevolent exuberance. As long as you know what to expect (and what not to), Survival of the Dead should provide 90 minutes of undemanding entertainment, with a decent bit of gore for a chaser. You can almost feel Romero's frustration that he can't make films without zombies anymore (and he can barely get those made following the undeserved failure of Land), but he still has a certain genius for making something from next to nothing. The title may sound like an oxymoron, but it may be the director's defiant statement on the state of his career right now.

Wendigo Meets 30 DAYS OF NIGHT (2007)

Once upon a time, the Other was an individual, an infiltrator from outside who threatened to subvert us from within with his or her seductive, decadent wiles and demonic charisma. Now, it seems, the Other is a collective, and we're less afraid (or secretly thrilled by the thought) of being conquered and enslaved by a master than of being overrun, overwhelmed, trampled, devoured. It's the difference between the vampire and the zombie, except when the vampires are more like zombies. While the romantic noble vampire occupies one end of the conceptual spectrum, at the other lurk the subhuman, the bestial, those for whom humans are no more than food.

That's what I was thinking when my friend Wendigo showed me David Slade's cinema adaptation of Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith's graphic novel. He'd read the book before he saw the movie, while to me the story was all new. Even before it was published, he was intrigued by the idea of thirty days without sun making the town of Barrow AK open season on humans for vampire tourists. Templesmith's art inspired him to think cinematically about the story before he'd even heard news of a movie being made. What he likes about it is that it's pure horror in which the vampires are pure monsters. To that extent the movie is more than faithful.

Barrow, before and during the 30 Days of Night.

While the graphic novel posits a vampire society in which the pack leader is answerable to a more powerful master, in the film the vampires operate on a purely pack level. None of them are given names, and they don't even speak a human language. Wendigo thinks this costs the film some of the comics' complexity, since the graphic novel portrays the invading vampires as rogues whose reckless rampage endangers the larger vampire community. But doing away with the vampire backstory makes the horror of the film story more stark and the use of vampire language enhances the sense of alien threat. Apart from the malice they express, these vampires may as well be zombies, but the kind of malice that zombies don't express is necessary for this film to work as a horror movie.

Danny Huston (center) and his vampire gang paint the town red. Below, despite a "no turning" rule for the occasion, even children get into the act.

It's when the film deals with the comics' human characters that it starts going wrong. The big change is in the relationship of Sheriff Eben (Josh Hartnett) and his wife Stella (Melissa George). In the graphic novel, Wendigo says, theirs is a deathless profound love, but the movie starts them off as the typical estranged couple (e.g. The Abyss)whose reconciliation is facilitated by crisis. And crisis is all it takes, because the script by Niles and two collaborators does next to nothing either to keep them bickering or to show their love rekindling. The writers seem to think it suffices to give Eben family to fight for, introducing two relatives in the movie (a grandmother and younger brother) who don't exist in the graphic novel and don't do much to justify their presence on screen. After establishing the grandmother's vulnerability, the movie never shows us her fate. But the real loss as far as Wendigo's concerned is with the main couple, because it's Eben's love for Stella that motivates him to take an extreme, soul-risking step to finally deal with the vampire menace. In the movie the main motivation seems to be to make possible a big fight scene at the end.

Ultimately, Slade's film is more action movie than horror film. At most, the situation inspires dread but the film doesn't seem to be out to scare us. It seems to exist in order to have large-scale action set pieces when the vampires run amok at first and the humans even the odds with technology later. As an action film, Wendigo felt it wasn't bad. As a gore film, despite some big moments that we've captured here he says the movie actually falls a little short of Templesmith's graphic effects.

Above, vampires can't stand up to modern machinery. Below, Huston bites the big one.

Wendigo suggests comparing 30 Days of Night with From Dusk Til Dawn to see what Slade's film gets right. 30 Days does a better job of portraying really menacing looking inhuman creatures than Rodriguez and Tarantino did with their rubber-suited wonders. Niles and Slade's vampires are pure predatory menace, less interested in making us like them than in annihilating us. They reminded me of Nazis in an odd way, which may just mean that 30 Days had tapped into a modern fear of genocide in which we are dehumanized by being seen simply as objects to be processed for destruction or things to be toyed with for perverse pleasure. As for Wendigo, he can't help judging it inferior to the graphic novel, but he's willing to recommend it as an action film and for vampire fans who appreciate the variety of forms the vampire takes today.

Here's the trailer as uploaded to YouTube by SeventhDirectorate:

HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (1981)

My limited acquaintance with the work of Lucio Fulci has been a mixed experience. I love Zombie (aka Zombi 2, Zombie Flesh Eaters, etc) for its straightforward luridness and one of the most awesome moments in all cinema, the underwater battle between a zombie and a shark. But I took a look at The Beyond back when it had a run in the art houses about a decade ago, and my response was somewhere between "Huh?" and "So?" The dead rising to eat people I could deal with, but the other film somehow didn't make sense. So is it me, or is it Fulci? The rubber match is his haunted house/mad doctor gorefest, which I watched on a cheapo DVD that presumably reproduces the version first seen by American audiences. Better versions exist, but I found this in a bargain bin at a price which, given that the film was at least letterboxed, I couldn't resist at this time of year.

It's a film of its time, which is to say long enough after The Shining came out to reflect its influence. The influence is most obvious in a little boy's ability to communicate with a little girl in an old photograph. The girl is warning Bob not to move in to a particular house in New Whitby, Massachusetts, where Bob's dad is going to do research, but where the previous occupant killed himself after apparently slaughtering his own family. Before the credits, the abandoned house serves as a passion pit/deathtrap for the archetypal horny teens, one of whom gets a big knife thrust through her skull so the point comes out of her open mouth. She's dragged away by a mostly unseen entity.

The little girl who lives in the photograph comes to life in House By the Cemetery.

Bob's dad begins to piece together the story of Dr. Jacob Freudstein (that's "freud-steen."), an even earlier tenant who was buried in the basement according to a crypt marker the family finds. Bob himself learns more from the little girl in the picture, who looks very much alive to him once he reaches New Whitby. She shows him the grave of a Mrs. Freudstein (still "freud-steen.") but divulges that she "isn't very dead." Meanwhile, a realtor and a briefly -suspicious maid learn that there's still a menace in the basement, and it likes to cut throats, repeatedly, before dragging the bodies away.

The thing in the House by the Cemetery is pretty sloppy, leaving behind great streaks of blood for the maid to clean up, then killing the maid and leaving whole pieces of her behind.

Fulci takes an old-school approach with this menace, keeping it mostly out of view for most of the picture to build up anticipation of the big reveal. The fact that it's a single menace rather than an army of monsters is also rather retro for this director. Leave the gore out of it and it's a pretty conventional horror film. But you can't leave the gore out because that's the point of Fulci's films, or at least those I've seen. He's interested in creating a particular kind of fear. If older horror provoked empathy for victims in peril or a sympathetic dread that you might experience a similar fate, Fulci dares you to witness atrocities. This is a perfectly legitimate approach to horror, and not to be dismissed as a cheap sensationalist substitute for classic horror's power of suggestion. But here the gore scenes seem secondary, part of the buildup for the ultimate reveal of Dr. Freudstein ("freud-steen," remember.) in the basement.

As the story's been pieced together, the good doctor has been in the house for more than a century, keeping himself alive by blasphemous means and from appearances doing not a great job of it. He kills people and somehow uses them to revitalize his cells, but it looks like more than that is going on. The reveal is worth the wait as we see one sick creature, its face worn away to near blankness, slow moving but equipped with a powerful claw-like right hand that can rip a man's throat out when knives aren't handy. He grunts rather than talks but seems to be able to imitate crying children. Stab him and he bleeds maggots. His mere existence is an atrocity. Freudstein is one of the most repellent movie monsters I've ever seen.

But there must be more to the house by the cemetery than Freudstein's experiments and crimes. It turns out that the girl who befriended Bob is Freudstein's daughter from the 19th century, who with her mother somehow escaped their monstrous breadwinner by entering into (I guess) another dimension where Bob himself takes shelter at the end of the movie. So did the presence of such a bend in reality perhaps drive the doctor mad or is it just there for the sake of adding another weird element to a film that'd be quite weird enough without it, thank you? Since there often is no "why" in European horror, expect no firm answer from Fulci, but sometimes the absence of a "why" is an intrinsic part of the horror.

Somehow, it hangs together, even if held together more by suggestion, or even inference, than logic. The whole business with the girl and the other dimension is more a matter of poetic license, if I dare say that about an Italian gore film, than a practical dramatic element. House By the Cemetery has the dream-logic of a nightmare, and there isn't really an objective standard for appraising such things. I liked it better than I did The Beyond, but it's nowhere near as much fun as Zombie, but I don't think it was meant to be. I liked it faults and all, but someone not liking it would be perfectly understandable. Whatever its rank in the Fulci filmography, I'd risk recommending it to people looking for a creepy and nasty movie for the Halloween season.

Khadafi96 uploaded the English language trailer.

In Brief: TRIGGER MAN (2007)

What's Kino, a DVD label nearly as prestigious as Criterion, doing carrying this low-budget shoot-'em up from Ti West, a director with so few credentials that the box cover bills him as the director of a film that has yet to appear -- and that's Cabin Fever 2? One reason seems to be that Trigger Man got some positive reviews from critics who admired its rigorous approach to a simple story. Indeed, there's nothing fancy about this movie -- there's nothing much about it, period. It takes minimalism to the edge of nothingness, but doesn't quite tumble over to oblivion. It does leave you wondering what the point was to it all.

There's not much to say other than we follow three guys into the woods on a hunting trip that seems more like an opportunity to fire guns and drink beer until, as they say, the hunters become the hunted. West does offer an interesting twist on the formula, as the menace comes not from within the woods itself, but from a grim looking apparently abandoned factory complex. Our heroes are at the border of civilization, questioning whether they should be firing guns so close to a populated area, when the mayhem begins.

The object seems to be to get our adrenalin pumping as the survivors of the first shots run for cover, then to set our nerves at edge as the last survivor decides that his only chance is to go into the factory and track down the sniper. West succeeds at his first objective, but bogs down toward the end. The problem is, once we're down to the final guy, then either the film is going to be very short or we can safely assume that he won't be struck down from out of nowhere. This is where West's decision not to do point-of-view shots of the sniper hurts him. Once we begin to decide that the final guy is safe for the time being, shots from the sniper's view might shake us out of our growing complacency. But West staked success on our worrying that the final guy could be struck down at any moment, and for me, at least, that strategy failed.

The other reason for Trigger Man's being seems to be to serve up some modest samples of modern day gore. We get two particularly gruesome headshots, one made more awful by the surviving hero's pathetic attempt to collect the blasted brains of his buddy, the other made more gratuitously sickening by a closeup of blood dripping from a shard of shattered skull. I may have just recommended the film for some people, and I ought to say that the film isn't bad or poor. It has an admirable ambition to make a virtue of limited resources and authentic locations, but doesn't quite work as planned. Fans of outdoor suspense and bloodshed may like it better than I did, but those who approach it without such specialized interests may like it less. To each your own.

TRAGIC CEREMONY (Estratto dagli archivi segreti della polizia di una capitale europea, 1972)

Italians, it seems, have never worried about whether movie titles will fit on their marquees. Their tastes run to surrealism as well as verbosity, as any giallo fan knows. The original title of "Robert Hampton's" film translates to "Taken from the secret police archives of a European capital," -- London, to be specific. For that matter, the original title of "Robert Hampton" is Riccardo Freda, the name of a seminal figure in Italian fantasy cinema. Freda used the Hampton pseudonym on several occasions, perhaps sometimes as part of the common Italian scheme of convincing audiences (their own as well as foreign) that they were looking at an American or English film. Freda worked in many genres, including peplums and spaghetti westerns, but was most at home making gothic horror films, from which group I can recommend The Ghost (Lo Spettro), a Barbara Steele vehicle from 1963 released under the Hampton name.

While the Italian title suggests a cop film or possibly something along conspiratorial lines, the title used on the Dark Sky DVD actually better represents what you actually get: a dark film having something to do with a mysterious ceremony. Tragic Ceremony is a late expression of Freda's gothic style, incorporating developments in cinematic bloodshed since his heyday of the 1950s and 1960s.

Over music by Stelvio Cipriani, we're introduced to four young people on a sailboat. The boat belongs to Bill, the scion of a wealthy English family. His pals Joe and Fred are basically sponging off him, while he gives Jane, the lone female, a gift of a pearl necklace he swiped from his mom. The necklace has a curse: it was given to an exorcist by a grateful client, but the exorcist was subsequently killed.

Our crazy kids continue their trek on land until their car runs out of gas. They make it to a gas station where the attendant won't accept Bill's traveller's checks without proper ID. The dumbass left all that important stuff back on the road or on the beach, but the gas guy pities Jane and gives them just enough, he says, to make it into town. They don't get quite that far, but do break down in sight of a gated mansion where they can buzz for assistance. The Alexanders prove generous hosts, giving the gang the run of the servants' quarters.

While the guys vegetate, Jane feels herself strangely drawn deeper within the mansion. In an atmospheric shot reproduced (and enhanced) in the poster art, she descends a staircase in a high-ceilinged chamber as curtains billow with the wind through wide-open windows. Along the way, she breaks the necklace. Jane discovers what appears to be a satanic ritual of some kind. She watches, enthralled, and then approaches languidly like a willing sacrifice.

By now the knuckleheads figure out that Jane's gone and make their way down the stairway and into the ritual area. They don't like what they see: crabby looking elderly devil-worshippers (an all too common motif in this period) about to kill Jane. Bill intervenes and struggles with Lady Alexander for a sacrificial knife. He ends up accidentally killing her. The satanists are understandably irked. Less understandably, instead of going after the meddling kids, they start killing one another. Each death is a set piece gore effect, the highlight being a man getting his head cleaved in half with a sword. It's effectively shocking the first time you see it, but Freda flashes back to it all too often later on. Most of the other effects are too blatantly mechanical to truly shock or chill us. The trailer gives most of them away.

The gang evacuates, dodging people pitching themselves off balconies, and zoom off in their refurbished buggy. They stop at the gas station, but it looks like the attendant's abandoned it. They head to Bill's place, but his mom sends him to his father's hangout. There they learn from TV that the police believe that some Manson-style youth gang annihilated all those poor old people. It might be wise to lay low where they are, except that there it's their turn to start dying....

With the botched sacrifice, Tragic Ceremony jumps the shark. There doesn't seem to be any good reason for the mayhem that follows, and you have no basis for believing that anything really supernatural was going on until the kids start dying later. Until then, Freda has been working a nice, slow burn, building up suspense and atmosphere in deliberate fashion, even including a good old fashioned thunderstorm. Once the gore commences, it's as if he lost heart. There's one good, agitating sequence as the last of the guys flees frantically on a motorcycle from a hallucination of Jane's half-rotten face, but from there the film staggers to a conclusion that tries to explain too much. You suspect that someone lacked confidence in gothic horror's potential to scare 70s audiences, even though this was made around the same time that Mario Bava had a success with the retro-gothic Baron Blood. By the end, you wonder if anyone knew what they were doing -- or what they wanted to do.

The DVD boasts the Italian soundtrack with English subtitles in a letterboxed edition that looks good but far from pristine. The main extra is an English-language interview with Camille Keaton, who played Jane, reviewing her European career prior to her most infamous screen credit, I Spit On Your Grave. I got the disc at a closeout sale at a pretty good discount, so that while I wouldn't really recommend it as a keeper except for Italian horror completists, I can't complain too much about the cost.