Welcome to the Brattle Grindhouse

Man, I don't think I've ever seen so many prints with the type of damage that makes them turn red in one period of time. Before the first one I saw, Vanishing Point, Ned came out to apologize, saying it was the worst print the Brattle had ever played, which is saying something. All that stuff Rodriguez and Tarantino did to make the print of Grindhouse look like crap? This is the real deal.

Vanishing Point

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

Quentin Tarantino has a habit of name-dropping in his movies, and no movie is referenced more in his latest, Death Proof, than Vanishing Point. As per usual, he's got good taste; while many of the grindhouse movies he and Robert Rodriguez were meaning to invoke were not actually very good, this one is worth tracking down - at least if you like chase movies.

Credit Vanishing Point, especially in the early going, with clarity of purpose: Kowalski (Barry Newman) speeds across the Western U.S. in a white 1970 Dodge Challenger that he's trying to deliver from Denver to San Francisco in less than a day. While he's driving, his mind occasionally flashes back to an earlier time... when he was a race car driver. As the film goes on, we learn a bit more about his history, and we encounter a few other characters that he meets on the road, as police in four states try to capture him and disc jockey "Super Soul" (Cleavon Little) spins the soundtrack, feeds him coded advice on what the cops are doing, and elevates the driver to the level of a folk hero.

Vanishing Point is an essential movie for the speed junkie; director Richard Sarafian and cinematographer John Alonzo communicate the feelings of joy, freedom, and power that come from driving a fast car, but they don't overdo it. As we look out Kowalski's window, the road is moving fast, but never quite so fast that we doubt his ability to control the car. Unlike the action filmmakers of a generation later, they favor a steady camera showing the road going by or a majestic cloud of dust to overstating the issue by shaking it. The photography does a nice job of setting the scene, too - for example, even seen on this pretty terrible print, the punishingly hot vastness of the Nevada desert is overwhelming.

Full review at EFC.

Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

There are some horror movies that use their first half to tease the audience, setting up a palpable dread or quietly dropping hints about information that may prove useful later. Then there's the likes of Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, which frantically tread water for an hour because they've only got the budget for maybe thirty minutes' worth of action and theaters are reluctant to book a film much shorter than an hour and a half.

So we've got Alan (Alan Ormsby) and his troupe of actors taking a boat to an island within sight of Miami which features a graveyard and an abandoned inn. He's trying to psyche them up for a spooky play he's written. This involves getting them to participate in a ceremony where he will attempt to raise an exhumed corpse - that is, when he's not on a power trip, reminding them that without the jobs he's given them, they're not working in showbiz. He appears genuinely disgusted and angry when his incantations don't actually bring a corpse to life. Of course, it does, and not just one; it's just that their muscles are stiff and don't get limber until the group is gathered together in the inn, with the graveyard between them and their boat.

The good news is that once the dead crawl out of their graves, the movie delivers the goods. We came for killing, and the zombies deliver, tearing into the roughly nine or ten people on the island with gruesome gusto and splattering nicely when they fight back. The makeup, blood, and guts are pretty good for a cheapo grindhouse picture; the filmmakers certainly aren't worried about saving any for their next picture. Co-writers Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby (Ormsby also stars; Clark directs) opt for fairly slow, inarticulate zombies with rudimentary problem-solving and tool-using capabilities, and that works out pretty well for them. The living can take out one, but get in trouble pretty quickly when they have to face a crowd.

Full review at EFC.

Satan's Cheerleaders

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

I first became aware of this movie about twenty years ago; it was used in a cryptogram or "spot the fake" puzzle in Games Magazine. That's about the right amount of contact to have with this movie - it's fun to know that it exists, and to imagine what such a movie might be like. One should not sully those happy thoughts with actual first-hand experience.

The actual experience involves a group of four cheerleaders being bratty, but still being enticing to their school's janitor Billy (Jack Kruschen). Unfortunately for them, Billy is both a Satanist and able to sabotage their coach Ms. Johnson's car, and turns up just in time to give them a list - not to the game, but to the local Satanic altar where he tries to make blonde Patti (Kerry Sherman) his love slave. The girls and Ms. Johnson (Jacqueline Cole) escape, but when they find the local sheriff (John Ireland), he and his wife (Yvonne De Carlo) turn out to be Satanists, too - indeed, pretty much everyone in the area is, and they see the fulfillment of a prophecy in these girls.

The biggest problem with Satan's Cheerleaders is that no-one is really trying very hard. The script by Greydon Clark and Alvin Fast doesn't have a single memorable line, and worse, is lazy in creating its threats. So, all these guys are Satanists - what's the big deal? None of them display much in the way of supernatural powers, they bicker too much to ever come together as a real threat, and they never really seem to have that sinister a plan. If they were really interested in making a genuinely suspenseful horror movie, they might well have been better off just making the villains nasty rednecks. The story only comes close to wit once, toward the end, as it follows up the obvious bit of finding a virgin to sacrifice on the cheerleading team with something dark and mean which enough that the audience may feel a little bad about laughing at it.

Full review at EFC.

Nightmare City (Incubo sulla città contaminata)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

Usually, my trouble with zombie movies is that it's hard to believe that the situation is really apocalyptic - most zombie outbreaks, from Night of the Living Dead to 28 Days Later, look like they could be contained. Nightmare City has the opposite issue - I have a bit of trouble believing it could be contained as long as it is. Neither is really a big problem, since the people we meet are still in danger.

The first person we meet is named Dean Miller (at least in the English-dubbed version shown), a reporter for a local television station. He's covering the arrival of a plane filled with government scientists and military types, which turns out much more interesting than it sounds: After landing without any contact with the control tower, it disgorges a cargo of atomically-mutated zombies, eager to chew on flesh and drink blood. When Dean (Hugo Stiglitz) tries to get this on the air, he's taken off the air by General Murchison (Mel Ferrer), who doesn't want a panic started, but still sends the message to his daughter Jessica (Stefania D'Amario) and her husband Bob (Pierangelo Civera) to barricade the doors and let no-one in. Murchison's assistant, Major Holmes (Francisco Rabal), delivers roughly the same message to his young artist wife Sheila (Maria Rosaria Omaggio), while Miller takes what is likely the more sensible route of going to the hospital where his wife Anna (Laura Trotter) practices and trying to convince her to get the heck out of town.

All of these places, of course, are spots zombies particularly enjoy turning upside down in movies: Hospitals are multi-level mazes where "sick" people are brought for examination; houses generally have one forgotten method of ingress and can seem much less safe once the power goes out; television stations have studios full of pretty girls shooting a live disco-dance hour whose flimsy tops can be pulled off by clawing mutants just before the biting starts, inciting the panic that the military had hoped to avoid. Director Umberto Lenzi has a grand time throwing his marauders at the place, since it gives him the opportunity to jump between chase, siege, and ambush sequences, rather than settling for doing them in relatively predictable sequence. He's good at giving each the sort of energy they need, and jumping between them does make things like the friend showing up at the door a little less predictable because one's head is still in "chase" mode.

Full review at EFC.

Return of the Living Dead

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

Return of the Living Dead is something close to a failure as a horror movie, if it was even trying to be one. That's no bad thing; of all the hyphenated genres, "horror-comedy" is the one whose components are most at cross-purposes, and in a case like that, it's better to do one thing very well than to do two poorly.

The film posits that the events of Night of the Living Dead actually happened, although Romero took some liberties in adapting the story. Afterward, the military put the zombies into containers, some of which were accidentally shipped to a biological supplies distributor in Louisville, KY. The place's night manager, Frank (James Karen), is showing these barrels to new employee Freddy (Thom Mathews) when he breaks the seal, letting one zombie out. Frank, Freddy, and their boss Burt (Clu Gulager) subdue it somewhat, but no amount of dismemberment will actually stop it moving. They get the bright idea of bringing it to the funeral home Ernie Kaltenbrunner (Don Calfa) owns next door and burning it in the crematorium. It's not a bad plan, but the smoke coming out of the stack combines with the rain clouds overhead, basically putting the virus that reanimates corpses into an aerosol form. That's the bad news; the worse news is that there's a graveyard nearby where Freddy's punk friends are waiting for him to finish work.

It's easy to make a zombie movie sound silly just by listing what happens in it, but writer/director Dan O'Bannon embraces that silliness better than most. The little details are funny, and he gets his cast to play it not quite straight, but far short of mugging. When Burt and Frank are trying to convince Ernie to let them burn a few rather active garbage bags full of zombie parts, they spin a lame story about the bags being full of rabid weasels which is obviously ridiculous, and there's this look on their faces that says they're sorry it's the best they could come up with, but, you know, this isn't a situation they're prepared for. That's the feel of the whole movie in a nutshell, from the paramedics examining someone who has recently been infected to the military liaison (Jonathan Terry) who has been waiting for a call like tihs for a while - we're doing the best we can, but the whole zombie thing is throwing us off.

Full review at EFC.

Rabid

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

David Cronenberg hits a lot of buttons in Rabid, playing on his audience's fears of anything particularly intimidating. Everything from science to sex to harshly implemented authority has its moment in here, and it all comes together in some a way that's as interesting as it is scary.

A motorcycle incident leaves Rose (Marilyn Chambers) and Hart (Frank Moore) injured - Rose especially is badly burned - but though it happens too far out in the country to get them to an emergency room, there is a clinic nearby where the wealthy receive plastic surgery. Word of the accident gets Dr. Dan Keloid (Howard Ryshpan) out of a meeting with his financier, Murray Cypher (Joe Silver), and he quickly determines that the only way to save her is with a new type of graft he's developed. The surgery does more than just restore Rose's health and beauty, though - it's mutated her internally, giving her a new organ that allows her to feed on blood. Nothing else satisfies her, and to make things worse, those she feeds on quickly develop symptoms of rabies - only much, much worse. A trail of outbreaks between Keloid's clinic and Montreal soon bring the World Health Organization and the military into the picture.

Rabid was released thirty years ago, but Cronenberg's vision remains fascinating for a number of reasons. He's using some classic horror devices - Rose could easily be called a vampire; her victims are close to the now-famous zombie template - but rather than try to do what many have done and try to come up with a real-world explanation for all the trappings of vampirism, he builds something like a vampire from science-fictional building blocks. It feels more real that way - a modern horror, rather than an attempt to recreate something familiar. And while Cronenberg isn't the first to make a horror movie that features soldiers becoming a threat to the citizenry in response to a crisis - and, obviously, he's far from the last - he strikes a nice balance between the necessity of some form of martial law in response to a crisis and the potential for disaster.

Full review at EFC.

The Crazies

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

Go figure; I've seen this as part of events twice (previously, at the SF Marathon), and I think I nodded off at the exact same spots both times. I've got no idea how the party gets thinned out.

Fortunately, it's one of those movies where you can drift off for a bit and the end result doesn't feel disjointed; George Romero keeps a very steady tone throughout.

Maybe I'll rent this sometime. At the very least, it'll be a good way to catch a nap on demand.

Beyond the Door II (Schock)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

Beyond The Door II, also known as "Shock", has the title of a sequel (at least in America) and relies heavily on prior events. Knowledge of these prior events is not a necessity, though, and that's good - this is a thematically linked if not makeshift series about haunted houses rather than one where characters carry over. I'm not even sure knowing the history beforehand would help, rather than kill suspense.

Dora Baldini (Daria Nicolodi) and her husband Bruno (John Steiner) are moving back into Dora's family home. Bruno is Dora's second husband; her first died several years back, although no body was found; the house has been shut up ever since. Not surprising she wanted nothing to do with the place; he and Dora did a lot of drugs back then, and she can't remember the exact circumstances of his death. Son Marco (David Colin Jr.) was a product of that first marriage, and though Marco is fond of his stepfather, he's still not "Dad". Since Bruno is an airline pilot, Dora and Marco have a lot of time alone at the house, with its spooky basement and new imaginary friend for Marco.

If we have learned anything from the movies, it's that a new imaginary friend for your kid when you move to a new home is a pretty clear warning sign to get the heck out while you've still got all your blood. Even if that ghost is friendly, there are probably others whose intentions aren't quite so benign. This one certainly isn't; either through influence or straight-out possession, it's having an unsettling effect on Marco, who is not only starting to practice some basic thaumaturgy, but is starting to look at his mother in a way that sons generally don't.

Deep Red (aka The Hatchet Murders, Profondo Rosso)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

Dario Argento doesn't make false promises with the title of this movie; as someone with even just passing familiarity with giallo and Argento might expect, the film has plenty of blood and the picture is photographed to maximize the shocking red. Beneath Argento's gloss, though, is a fairly competent murder mystery undermined by some rather hammy acting.

The opening introduces us to Helga Ulmann (Macha Meril), whom we're told is a powerful psychic. She swoons slightly at a lecture, claiming she feels terrible evil from someone in the room. Whether she was for real or got "lucky" doesn't matter; the next time we see her she's being attacked with a hatchet. Her neighbor Marcus Daly (David Hemmings), a visiting English pianist, witnesses the attack, but before he can do anything, the woman is dead. Convinced he's seen something the police don't, Daly investigates on his own, finding reporter Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi) alternately helpful and a nuisance.

There's an air of the paranormal around the mystery, thanks to the dead medium and an abandoned house that the locals certainly treat as being haunted. Argento and company don't lean too heavily on that, though; while Blood Red probably isn't a solvable mystery, it's not one that will spring "character X can move the murder weapon with his mind" on you without any warning, either. Nor does it give Marcus much information that it doesn't share with the audience; it plays fair enough. I don't quite think it makes sense, even beyond the killer being kind of insane - I'm still trying to puzzle out just how one character fits into the story beyond the need to have another murder midway through the movie. That may partly be an artifact of the cuts, though - the English-dubbed print screened is half an hour shorter than the Italian version.

Full review at EFC.

The School That Couldn't Scream (aka What Have They Done To Solange?, Cosa avete fatto a Solange?)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

There's something about The School That Couldn't Scream that remains oddly restrained, even as it happily heaps on more and more lurid subject matter. Slasher films have always had a peculiar moral code, though, and it's just a question of whether this one is more or less peculiar than others.

It starts out innocently enough, with teenager Elizabeth Seccles (Cristina Galbo) and her gymnastics teacher Enrico "Henry" Rosseni (Fabio Testi) making out in a canoe. Elizabeth thinks she sees something strange, but when they row to the riverbank to investigate, they find nothing. What they just missed was one of Elizabeth's classmates getting murdered, and when Henry stops by that spot on his way to class the next morning because he sees police cars, Scotland Yard becomes suspicious. Strangely enough, his wife Herta (Karin Baal) never does, and even helps him as he tries to clear his name. What they eventually discover is that the mounting victims shared a connection to a younger girl at another school named Solange (Camille Keaton), who may hold the key to what's going on.

The materials for an enjoyably trashy mystery movie are all here, and the problem may be that this movie identifies itself as a mystery rather than a thriller or what would later become known as a slasher movie. It's not that I necessarily want there to be more exploitation or graphic violence; it's that by framing it as a murder mystery, the writers wind up focusing on Henry, who has an alibi from the start. More visceral thrills would probably come from focusing on the girls, as they are the ones that could potentially be knocked off at any moment. This may be the fault of adhering too closely to the source material: I haven't read Edgar Wallace's The Clue of the New Pin, but it certainly sounds more like a detective novel than something pulpy. It's as though the filmmakers got caught between a genteel English detective story and a lurid Italian giallo and wound up doing a mediocre job on both.

Full review at EFC.

Paranoia (Orgasmo)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

Paranoia (or Orgasmo, its original Italian name) could almost be a play, so tightly does it focus on its core set of characters. This allows it to be single-minded in slowly turning the screw on its main character, working the audience's nerves without distraction.

Kathryn West (Carroll Baker) arrives in Italy a recent widow, remembered in New York more as a gold-digger than a once-promising artist. She's not quite welcomed to her new villa with open arms by longtime housekeeper Teresa (Lilla Brignone), and defying her is part of the reason she opens the house to Peter Donovan (Lou Castel), a handsome expatriot American. Sparks quickly fly, but threaten to fizzle when she sees him with sultry Eva (Colette Descombes). Not to worry, though - she's his sister. Yeah, that's it. His sister.

Kathryn's an interesting character, and Carroll Baker is interesting casting, because the temptation might be to go with someone younger, more obviously a trophy wife. If that's what Kathryn is, she's at least put some time in for her inheritance. Yeah, she's connecting with with Peter kind of fast, but even with as little as Kathryn begrudgingly says about her marriage, it doesn't seem unreasonable that she's ready for somebody to see her that way. She may have genuinely loved her husband, but she spent her youth on him and maybe it was a while since they'd been intimate. You can read a lot into her words and actions, even when she's saying that the details of her marriage are no-one's business but her own.


Full review at EFC.

Autopsy (Macchie Solari)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 29 May 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Welcome to the Grindhouse)

Yeah, this knocked me out. Too bad; it looked pretty good.