Johnny Mundano

Some things that fell out of my head

[johnnymundano]

Paolo Carlini in Like Rabid Dogs (Come cani arrabbiati, Mario Imperoli, 1976)

[johnnymundano]

Silent Action (1975)

(La Polizia Accusa: Il Servizio Segreto Uccide

The Police Accuse: The Secret Service Kills)

Directed by Sergio Martino

Written by Gianfranco Couyoumdjian, Massimo Felisatti, Fabio Pittorru and Sergio Martino

Music by Luciano Michelini

Starring Luc Merenda, Tomas Milian, Mel Ferrer and Delia Boccardo

Runtime 94 minutes

Source: UK blu ray by Fractured Visions (FVBD001)

What is Silent Action?

Silent Action is a blunt force 1975 Italian cop thriller by the master of multiple genres, Sergio Martino. I'd say its a Poliziotteschi, others might quibble. Silent Action has a conspiracy plot that might seem a bit fanciful if you aren't aware of Italy's Years of Lead. And, no, it is not so named because of an upswing in italy's pencil production. This period ran from the late '60s to the early '80s and was filled with so much bombing, terrorism, authoritarianism, anti-authoritarianism, insurgency, counter insurgency, kidnapping and rampant violent crime that Silent Action's plot seems eerily feasible now the bodies have been buried and the dust settled.

Plot:

A number of retired Italian generals are knocked off in what look like entertainingly violent accidents but aren't. They aren't accidents that is, they are definitely entertainingly violent. Not usually the purview of your average plod that stuff, but investigation of an apparent robbery-turned-murder by Inspector Giorgio Solmi (Luc Merenda; single-minded, handsome, virile) suggests they are all interlinked. Dealing with a different breed of criminal than usual, Solmi finds his methods becoming more and more excessive. Is a conspiracy afoot? Will Solmi betray the law and everything he stands for to stop it? Action, surprises, excitement and answers to all these questions are on the menu in Sergio Martino's Silent Force!

Is it any good?

Yes.

Why?

All the main actors are great, which helps enormously. Thankfully Merenda avoids the Italian male lead role bear trap of blandness and looks genuinely caught up in the chase and unheeding of the depths he's plumbing. Mel Ferrer is, obviously, there for the US market and while he's mostly required, as Merenda's boss, to tut schoolmarmishly at Merenda's behaviour he does it well, with a reserved decency suitable to the role. Merenda's two cop buddies don't slack off either; best is the guy who is always on about his family and might as well have a countdown to his death on his forehead. Female roles aren't great (girlfriend-reporter, brothel madame, whore etc) but the women in them do their best. Italian genre legend Tomas Milian is pretty low key under a mistake of a haircut, but certainly makes his mark by the end of the movie.

There's some seriously nice scenery too, which I enjoy in these old movies. The standout scenery is when Merenda and Boccardo eat a meal on a balcony; just after Merenda has romantically demonstrated how to bash in a head with a poker on a nearby and luckless vegetable. Action is crunchy throughout and there are some tense set pieces; and ultimately Silent Action pulls off its conspiracy plot quite neatly. Mostly because the plotters aren't idiots.

Unfortunately the movie's financial limitations peek through occasionally. There's some funny dummy action in an otherwise impressive chase sequence, and the big action finale is too much of a budgetary stretch with its quick shots of toy jeeps and helicopters blowing up. But that's just pretty carping. Overall Silent Action is a fun time thrill ride with a proper '70s kick-the-audience-in-the-nuts ending.

Sound & Picture:

The picture shows its age sometimes but is mostly clean and clear. Has an odd brown patina which is very '70s, so I liked that. Sound was, uh, good. Basically I'm not very technical; I found it perfectly fine on sound and vision, but no gamechanger. Big shout out to the subtitler though, the very droll use of swearing was much appreciated.

Ciao, Bella!

[johnnymundano]

Luc Merenda in Silent Action (1975, Sergio Martino)

[johnnymundano]

Human Lanterns (1982)

Directed by Chung Sun Screenplay by Kuang Ni and Chung Sun Music by Chin-Yung Shing and Chen-Hou Su Country: Hong Kong Language: Mandarin (English subtitles) Running time: 94 minutes

CAST

Tony Liu as Lung Shu-Ai Kuan Tai Chen as Tan Fu Lieh Lo  as Chao Chun-Fang Ni Tien as Lung's Wife Linda Chu as Yen Chu Hsiu-Chun Lin as Tan Mei-mei Meng Lo as Kuei Szu-Yi Chien Sun as Sergeant Pan

Human Lanterns is a ridiculous and ridiculously entertaining Hong Kong martial-arts-horror movie from The Shaw Brothers. Shaw Brothers movies inhabit a bubble of moviedom entirely their own; much like an Elvis Movie or a Nikkatsu Action movie or even, yes, a David Lynch movie. If you’ve seen one Shaw Brothers movie you may not have seen them all but you will have seen what they are all like. This is by no means a criticism. But it does mean if you have ever seen a Shaw Brothers movie and disliked it then you’re unlikely to like Human Lanterns. If you have and you did then you will. If you see what I mean.

Two rich men in a fairy-tale Hong Kong past of fancy hats, submissive women and ornate roofing spend their abundant free time scheming to outdo and embarrass each other in public. This pointless cock measuring culminates every year in a contest to see who can place the best lantern in the town’s prestigious lantern festival. Tan Fu (Kuan Tai Chen with a moustache) peaks early by unveiling a magnificent lantern unlikely to be rivalled by mere mortal artisanship. It looks like pompous toff Lung Shu-Ai (Tony Liu with inhumanly thick sideburns) is out of luck this year lantern-wise. But, while berating his tame drunk of a lantern maker it transpires the aged souse has been cheekily subcontracting his lantern construction to a mysterious and preternaturally skilled figure who skulks beyond town. Not entirely coincidentally this turns out to be Chao Chun-Fang (Lieh Lo – who, let us not forget,  by 1969 became the first ever Kung-Fu superstar, preceding even Bruce Lee) from whom Lung Shu-Ai stole his love while also scarring Chun-Fang in the process. Blinded by arrogance to the possibility this might horribly backfire on him Lung Shu-Ai employs Chao Chun-Fang to construct the most unique lantern ever.  Shortly thereafter the ladies loved by both Lung Shu-Ai and Tan Fu begin to disappear, abducted by a mysterious figure in a spooky skull mask who is fond of leaping about in slow motion. The finger of guilt points at both of the squabbling dandies in turn, but is the culprit someone else, possibly someone with a grudge, and can the two egotists shelve their inconsequential duel of wits and join forces before the title of the movie is given horrible reality? (I’m not expecting an answer there.)

Essentially then, Human Lanterns is indeed a very Shaw Brothers movie indeed. For the thoroughly uninitiated it should be noted that a Shaw Brothers movie typically has an uncomplicated plot with uncomplicated characters; physically impossible martial arts stunt work transformed via wires and adroit editing into delightful eye-boggling reality; costumes matched in their vivid flamboyance only by that of the wider-than-wide-screen acting; a setting sometime in a bogus past where people lived on sound-stages and apparently lived their entire lives within three of four imaginatively lit sets; a comedy drunk, usually old; a lot of faker than fake blood; a visual style at once utterly artificial and magically enchanting; and maybe a little bit of tit, depending on the mores of the decade in which the movie was made. For those already initiated into the unique splendour of the cinematic phenomenon known only as A Shaw Brothers Movie it should be noted that Human Lanterns is as ostentatiously bizarre and preposterously charming as any of its brethren.

[johnnymundano]

Great Comic Book Panels

From BATMAN: GOTHIC (DC Comics, 1990) By Klaus Janson (Art), Grant Morrison (Writer), Steve Buccellato (Colourist) and John Constanza (Letterer)

Batman created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger

[johnnymundano]

Prom Night (2008)

Directed by Nelson McCormick Screenplay by J.S. Cardone Music by Paul Haslinger Country: Canada, United States Running time: 88 minutes CAST Brittany Snow as Donna Keppel Scott Porter as Bobby Jessica Stroup as Claire Davis Dana Davis as Lisa Hines Collins Pennie as Ronnie Heflin Kelly Blatz as Michael Allen James Ransone as Detective Nash Brianne Davis as Crissy Lynn Kellan Lutz as Rick Leland Mary Mara as Mrs. Waters Ming-Na Wen as Dr. Elisha Crowe Johnathon Schaech as Richard Fenton Idris Elba as Detective Winn Jessalyn Gilsig as Aunt Karen Linden Ashby as Uncle Jack

Theft Alert: All images from IMDB

Donna Keppel (Brittany Snow; working hard here, bless) is the only survivor of a family massacre perpetrated by Richard Fenton (Johnathon Schaech; looking very Sean William Scott), a creepy teacher with a boner for her. Tonight Donna’s Prom Night is being held at a swanky hotel,  but tonight is also the night Richard escapes from The Home For Creepy Teachers With Wayward Boners. Everything you expect to happen happens, just a lot less interestingly than you would expect for a slasher movie, certainly for one that cost $20 million. Prom Night (2008) is like an experiment see if it possible to make a slasher flick so inoffensive and dumb it could be screened at tea time on The Disney®©™ Channel. It turns out it is in fact possible to make such a thing, but unfortunately no one would want to watch it. It actually makes you hanker for Prom Night (1980), as low-budget and timeworn as that disco slasher may well be.  

For starters, Prom Night (2008) is not a remake of Prom Night (1980) despite what anyone says. Fuck that noise, someone obviously just wanted to use the title. End. Of. They are both slasher movies which take place on Prom Night, but that’s it. I know this because I watched Prom Night (1980) recently for the first time, and last night I watched Prom Night (2008) for the last time. Prom Night (1980) has a mystery surrounding the identity of the killer, which keeps you awake and which also has a surprisingly strong emotional pay off, whereas in Prom Night (2008) we know who the killer is from the off, which is boring and has no pay off at all. Essentially then, this is the difference between the two, one is a bit amateurish but very entertaining, while the other is slick as snot on a door handle and as dull as ditch water. 

Ultimately only one Prom Night successfully evokes the youthful exuberance of the night in question, which is important as I am 50 and English, so I have no personal experience whatsoever of a Prom Night. Also: get off my lawn! Prom Night (1980) makes it look like a fantastically enjoyable event at which hormonally crazed kids dance enthusiastically to fantastically simplistic disco. Apparently the movie was shot with the cast dancing to real, popular disco hits until the makers realised you have to actually pay to use other people’s music (?!who knew!?). Being a bit strapped for cash they had the soundtrack composer Carl Zittrer cook up some home-made disco beats at roughly the same tempo so the visuals and sound would still gel. Carl Zitterer did an excellent job.  A bit too excellent in fact, since the similarity was still so pronounced a $10 million lawsuit was brought against the movie (and settled for $50,000 – phew!). A small price to pay for one of the most cheerful and fun dance sequences I’ve ever seen, particularly as I didn’t pay it. Prom Night (1980) is a decent slasher flick but the dance floor sequence is just pure joy.  Prom Night (2008) makes Prom Night look like a shit night club where nobody knows anyone else there; seriously, the interaction of the core group with everyone else, who they apparently have known for years, is ridiculously minimal. And the songs are the kind of heatedly sexual nursery rhymes I am generationally disposed to dislike. I just don’t get it, basically. You crazy kids! “Who’s your daddy? And is he rich like me?” isn’t so much a song lyric to me as a reason to call the sex police. And while technically the dancing in Prom Night (2008) is smoother, the dancing in Prom Night (1980) is more realistically ramshackle and energetic. 

Also, in Prom Night (1980) the killer, whoever they are, is refreshingly human (they slip on the slippery floor at one point, etc) but in Prom Night (2008) the killer is a tediously efficient killer; which is odd because he’s just a school teacher with a creepy boner for one of his female students, which explains none of his killing efficacy. By rights he should just be crying while wanking over the school yearbook, as I imagine most creepy schoolteachers with boners for their female students do. Maybe creepy schoolteachers with boners for their female students find that reductive and a little offensive of me, and that’s a real crying shame there, because the last thing I want to do is offend creepy teachers with boners for their female students. Every school has that one teacher who dates his female students “secretly”, and as the female student ages out of school he replaces her with a new female student. Maybe you are that guy. In which case you need to hear this: Dude, you are creepy. No one is impressed; they are creeped out. Preying on children is not cool. And if they are in school they are children, I don’t care how developed their chest is. A light prison sentence or some intensive therapy are what you need, creepy teacher dude, not high fives and Budweiser with the bros. (I do apologise for the fact I went to school in the 1970s leading to my not acknowledging that creepy schoolteachers can also be female, and the students being creeped on can be both female and male; with any combination of gender being creeper and creeped upon. I guess everyone sex creeping on everyone else, well, that’s progress? Well done, everyone. Personally I would have tried to phase out the whole creepy-schoolteacher-with-a-boner-for-their-student thing but I guess expanding it across the gender spectrum is certainly one way to go.)

In terms of cast Prom Night (1980) only really has Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Nielsen as “names” but everyone is okay, and the characters are all quite quirky and sympathetic. Prom Night (2008) might not have many “names” but it has a far more professional level of acting, which is a win for it. But, alas, while there are real actors in Prom Night (2008) and they all try hard with what they are given, what they are given is so lacklustre and generic it is dismaying how much effort they probably had to put in just to make the characters seem as bland as they do. There’s the black couple; he’s good at sports, she’s a bit sassy. There’s the co-dependant bickering couple; he’s controlling and drinks too much, she’s whiny and, well, she’s just whiny. The gym teacher is sparky and enthusiastic like absolutely no gym teacher I’ve ever met in my half a decade existence, but very like every gym teacher in American high school set shows on Nickleodeon. The most interesting character is Detective Nash, and that’s only because James Ransone appears amusingly miscast; unless a cop who resembles Christian Bale if he was a candleblogger is your idea of a movie cop.  Obviously that’s nobody’s idea of a movie cop, luckily though Idris Elba knows what everyone expects from a Movie Cop and delivers it with lightly self-parodic gusto. Of course   Idris Elba is unarguably a charismatic screen presence; I know that because most of the things I’ve seen him in are godawful but he is always a pleasure. Maybe it’s just unfortunate choices on my part and I’m actually missing a string of entertainment pearls starring Idris Elba, even so Prom Night (2008) would come in on the poopy side of the mark sheet. But, again, even in something as poopy as Prom Night (2008) Idris Elba is fun. Here he’s The Big City Cop so he walks like he’s prolapsed and rasps his dialogue like he regularly gargles lava-hot cawfee. The enthusiasm Elba invests in playing this poorly written part makes up a bit for the utter idiocy of the character. Ultimately though nothing could distract from Detective Winn’s stupidity, so colossally boneheaded are his actions in the movie.

Prom Night (2008) seems to take place in an alternate universe where every authority figure is a moron. In a better slasher flick this might be a genuine attempt at a point, but here it’s just bad writing. Sure, you might think that everyone in authority in the universe we actually inhabit is a moron, and at this point in history you would have a strong case, counsellor. Exhibit one being our current lying coward of a Prime Minister (I write this in the year 2020). But the authority figures in Prom Night (2008) are actually more excessive in their cretinous obliviousness than even that lying shyster. Having (eventually) realised that the killer is loose Idris Elba visits Donna’s guardians, who decide not to bring her home immediately or have her placed in police custody for her own protection, because it might “embarrass her” in front of her friends and put a big downer on this magical night of awful dresses, terrible music and light fingerbanging. Idris Elba, a policeman remember, goes along with this, which is kind of epically dumb, but then he raises the dumbness stakes by going to the Hotel Swank to keep an eye on Donna. Literally. He actually stands by a bit of silver scaffold in the dance hall for hours, and stares at the back of her head, occasionally rubbing the top of his own head and pursing his lips. Incredibly this does nothing to locate and apprehend the killer, who is merrily killing staff and guest alike at his own convenience. Idris Elba even asks at the desk if they have seen the killer, even showing them a picture (which is some amazing police work for Prom Night (2008)). But when asked by the desk clerk if he should be concerned Idris Elba says ”no”. Later when the fact that the killer is in the hotel killing people can’t even be avoided by Idris Elba he pulls the fire alarm and the entire hotel decants chaotically onto the street. Because there’s absolutely no way the killer could get out unnoticed during that, right? Absolutely no way at all. Nu-uh! Essentially most of the people in Prom Night (2008) who die do so because Idris Elba’s character has all the brains of a shoe.

And a lot of people do die in Prom Night (2008), but don’t get too excited slasher flick fans, because it doesn’t really feel like it because the kills are largely inoffensive stuff; which in a slasher movie is kind of offensive in itself. Prom Night (2008)  tries to distract from the lack of splatter with sudden bursts of convulsive editing which just makes it look like the killer is over amorously cuddling people to the floor, or re-enacting his favourite Super Bowl tackles. The only clue that his victims are dead comes later when we get to see the body with some dainty little red marks on their clothes. So averse is Prom Night (2008) to actually getting bloody that one character has their throat slashed and so little claret splashes it’s preposterous. If you were asleep next to somebody with their throat cut you’d wake up sodden in the red stuff, you wouldn’t have to turn them over to discover they were dead. Maybe Prom Night (2008) should have invested some of that $20 million in a medical professional acting as a consultant to tell them that throat wounds tend to, you know, bleed profusely since it’s all the blood inside you coming out of that new hole that kills you. Okay, sometimes it’s the shock of blood loss that offs you but, whatever, there’s a lot of blood involved. There is, I admit, one artfully shot kill where an arc of blood spatters a sheet of plastic but mostly the effects in Prom Night (2008) are less Tom Savini and more Tom and Jerry.

Sadly then, when it comes to this particular Prom Night (2008) you’re better off staying at home and washing your hair.

[johnnymundano]

The Sister of Ursula (1978) AKA La Sorella di Ursula

Directed by Enzo Milioni

Screenplay by Enzo Milioni

Music by Mimi Uva

Country: Italy

Running time: 90 minutes

CAST

Stefania D’Amario as Dagmar

Barbara Magnolfi as Ursula

Vanni Materassi as Roberto

Marc Porel as Mister Nardi

Yvonne Harlow as Stella Shining

Antiniska Nemour as Jenny

Anna Zinnemann as Vanessa

Giancarlo Zanetti as Fillipo

Alice Gherardi as Young Girl Victim

Roberto De Ruggeriis as Young Man Victim

Danila Trebbi as Prostitute Victim

Thief Note: I stole the images from IMDB because the screengrabs looked like hot poop. (see review).

The Sister of Ursula is a giallo so grubbily sleazy it actually slips out of the already hardly wholesome giallo genre and thrusts itself urgently into the erotic thriller genre. Like many erotic thrillers (all?) The Sister of Ursula is anything but erotic and very rarely thrilling. Which is a shame as there are occasional glimpses of a decent giallo in-between the unlovely and far too numerous grapplings.

The titular sister of Ursula is Dagmar (Stefania D’Amario), who despite the title plays second fiddle to Ursula throughout and her role isn’t really worth the prize of the title. Unless she won it for the tender scene where she strokes herself off with a gold necklace. Otherwise, she’s very passive, her main function being to coddle Ursula (Barbara Magnolfi), a singularly unpleasant young woman who is always getting up in people’s faces with a sour truculence the envy of adolescents the world over. The two are staying in a tremendously 1970s hotel which is possibly the best character in the movie with its scintillatingly tasteless décor. Maybe it’s because I am English but I far preferred looking at the archaic vulgarity of the interior décor than I did the bits where people pawed each other’s slack flesh. Although these scenes of anti-erotica did contain a complementary profusion of archaic exterior décor in the form of many a wayward pubic thatch. Delightfully, in one of these grubby failures of arousal a gentleman is getting busy down under and the scene is shot so it looks like his well-coiffed hair is being worn by his paramour as a comedy merkin. But I digress…

It takes a while for the movie to get around to a plot since it is far more important for us to watch Dagmar take off her sensible travelling underwear of suspenders and panties, watch a sex worker (or in 1970’s Italian movie parlance: ”a whore”) get murdered and listen to Stella Shining (Yvonne Harlow) sing her one (terrible) song in the hotel nightclub. In the nearest thing the movie gets to a motif the song is about eyes and there are a lot of shots of the killer’s eyes and loads of voyeurism and Ursula has a stand out scene where she insanely monologues to a melty statue of Christ about eyes and in a way are we the audience not indicted by the very act of our watch.., okay, the movie doesn’t get very near a motif at all, but it’s sure some song that Stella Shining song. Yes, I did mention a murder because it turns out that Dagmar and Ursula’s arrival at the hotel has coincided with the start of a spate of nasty sex murders. And they are pretty nasty, even for a giallo. The killer has a penchant for watching a couple rut then moving in to dispatch the woman with what looks from the silhouette which always accompanies its unveiling rather like a large penis; a penis large enough to kill. I admit that the first time this occurred I paused and reflected on the many poor life choices that had led to me watching this pretty seedy 1970s Italian movie in 2020. Not because it looked like I was watching a movie where women were murdered by a killer possessing a monumental honker, but because the picture was so poor I had to kind of work out what that was a silhouette of. It’s 2020 I shouldn’t have to squint to make out the silhouette of a massive killer penis!

Throughout the movie, which I watched on Amazon prime courtesy of Shameless, I kept wishing the picture quality was better; mainly because the hotel furnishings were so fabulous, some of the fashions were incredible and the location of the Amalfi Coast(?) is a soothingly beautiful sight in-between the unedifying bouts of bumping uglies. It does, however, serendipitously give everything the look of postcards faded over time. So if Anna “The Love Witch” Biller is thinking of wasting a year of her life and several million dollars making a giallo set in a 1970s holiday resort shot so it looks like it’s a series of old postcards, could someone show her this movie first? Thanks. Unintentionally then, the shit picture quality actually does the movie a favour. But looking at the images here, which I stole from IMDB, show how it should look. Where possible I watch these kinds of movies (that is foreign movies, not killer penis movies) with subtitles and I can report the subtitles were pretty good throughout. But just for future reference, subtitlers of the world, you can take the vernacular thang too far. The only time I expect to hear Italians in the 1970s talking about wanting “a good shag” is when they are talking about tobacco or rugs. Otherwise it’s just jarring. These people are clearly not from Sheffield. I mean, coyness is not really appropriate; this is a movie where post coital women are disembowelled by a massive penis, I think we can cope with the word “fucking.”

Despite the intrusive, over long and decidedly flaccid scenes of unerotica The Sister of Ursula is quite entertaining. But the best bits are the bits the people who made it gave the shortest shrift; the giallo bits. For starters, the killer wears black leather gloves and a big hat in the OG giallo style and there is a marvellously befuddling concoction of plot threads. Not only is there a killer, they also appear to be armed not just with a blade (for the dispatching of gentlemen) but also a phallus of malice! Dagmar and Ursula are searching for their estranged mother after their father killed himself over his impotence, but Ursula believes her father still visits her and may be the killer, despite being, you know, dead, but a helpful local doctor explains that perhaps Ursula’s latent psychic powers have been triggered by the trauma of her father’s death, this apparently being “common” among adolescents, Dagmar tries to hook up with a suave drug addict who is maniacally jealous of the promiscuous Stella Shining, who may be involved in drug trafficking with the hotel owner, whose wife is leaving him for a young strumpet. There’s a lot going on is what I’m getting at, and a bit more room for those bits to breathe would have done the movie wonders. Unfortunately it shudders to a halt far too often to shed its kecks and ruin the mood. But for giallo fans, who are a breed apart from normal movie fans, there’s lots about The Sister of Ursula to love, not least the final reveal of the murder weapon.

[johnnymundano]

Great Comic Book Panels

From “This, I saw” reprinted in Hellraiser Masterpieces vol. 1 (BOOM! Studios, 2011) By Mike McMahon (art), Malcolm Smith (writer) and Michel Heisler (letterer). Hellraiser created by Clive Barker.

[johnnymundano]

Road Train (2010) (US: Road Kill)

Directed by Dean Francis

Screenplay by Clive Hopkins

Music by Rafael May

Country: Australia

Running time: 90 minutes

CAST

Xavier Samuel as Marcus

Bob Morley as Craig

Sophie Lowe as Nina

Georgina Haig as Liz

At the risk of upsetting 25,341,384 people 9,443 miles from me, Australia seems all kinds of horrible. At least in the movies I have watched over the last half century (he hastened to add). It’s like a giant killing machine in the shape of a country, with a population clinging to its edge and a vast central area of boiling death wherein only people in horror movies dare to tread. Don’t get me wrong, Britain is a dreary small-minded shitpit (particularly when the Tories are in power) but it’s not actively trying to kill you. Oh, I’m sure Australia is magical in real life, but Road Train is a horror movie so the decision of four friends to go camping in the wild leads to a series of schlocktastic low-budget events imbued with the distinctive tang of the Golden Age of Ozploitation  past. All of which is a good thing horror movie wise, less so if you work at the Australian Tourist Board.

Road Train starts off with a bit of feisty tent sex between Craig and Nina, overheard by an uncomfortable Marcus and Liz; it soon becomes apparent that there’s a bit of a prickly undercurrent between the three old friends and the new addition, Nina. Nina is eager to fit in but keeps being rebuffed and takes the weight of the unspoken discord between her beau, ultra-buff Craig, and long-time couple Marcus and Liz. Passive aggression is put on hold as a road train thunders up on them from the rear. For those puzzled by the title (hence the US rename to Road Kill), a road train is a truck cab pulling two or more freight trailers; they are largely used in remote rural areas as it takes them the length of a good sized town to just slow down, never mind the tougher stuff like turning and reversing.  And the best of luck with a three point turn, Rusty Nail. They are honkingly big; a bit like, um, like a train on the road in fact, and they are definitely not something you want to ram your small car from behind in the Australian outback, leaving you and your friends shaken and far from help. Whoops, it’s bad luck then for our bickering cast.

Being prone to lazy preconceptions as I am, when the befuddled youths extricated themselves from the wreck of their car and spotted the road train hunkered evilly in the distance, I admit I was settled in for an Oz riff on Duel (1971), Joy Ride (2001) or the already Oz-tastic Road Games (1981); cat and mouse truck versus schmuck shenanigans a-go-go. And that would have been fine, but I was pleasantly surprised by the unpleasant direction things rapidly took for our unlucky chums. Shit gets weird fast; weird and gory; Road Train puts its unavoidable rough edges to good use. Road Train is smart enough to understand that it can’t compete with the professionalism or budget of those road rivals so it puts pedal to the metal and goes hell for leather into the gonzo zone. And I do mean hell. Since its running time is largely taken up by four people and a truck it is no small achievement that Road Train is as entertaining as it is. And it is pretty entertaining.

Road Train might not have the budget to attract stars but its makers have sense enough to cast people who can really act. Bob (“Bobby”) Morley, as Craig, gets the best role and takes hold of it and shakes it like he wants to break it. Very much like a man who has laboured in the salt mines of both Neighbours and Home and Away and isn’t ever going back, thanks very much. Georgina Haig throws some nice acting moves as Liz, reminding me that she was also good in the pretty neat lo-budget Crawl (2011). Sophie Lowe gets the best female role as Nina, the character who actually manages to carve an arc out of the guts and insanity the four luckless chumps plummet into. Nervy wallflower to survivor type is a neat trick to pull off in 90 minutes, but pull it off she does. Xavier Samuel gets top billing because, well, I guess because The Twilight Saga: Eclipse was also released in 2010. Don’t get me wrong he’s very good here, but horror belter The Loved Ones (2009) is a better showcase for him personally. He sure as shit doesn’t sparkle here though, so Twilight fans beware. Fans of polite, well-crafted cinema should also tread lighly as Road Train is a greasy freak machine in the splatstastic tradition of Ozploitation past, when ingenuity and imagination had to make up for lack of the old dollarydoo. It’s well ripper!

[johnnymundano]

Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (2018)

Directed by Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund

Screenplay by S. Craig Zahler

Music by Fabio Frizzi

Country: United States

Running time: 90 minutes

CAST

Thomas Lennon as Edgar Easton

Jenny Pellicer as Ashley Summers

Nelson Franklin as Markowitz

Charlyne Yi as Nerissa

Michael Pare as Detective Brown

Alex Beh as Howie

Matthias Hues as Strommelson

Skeeta Jenkins as Cuddly Bear

Barbara Crampton as Carol Doreski

Udo Kier as André Toulon

Serafin Falcon as Richard

Kennedy Summers as Goldie

David Burkhart as Brian

All images taken from IMDB.

Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich is ostensibly an attempt to reboot the wholly terrible, yet unarguably endearing Puppet Master franchise. Mostly though it is concerned with getting a rise out of the audience. It’s kind of the cinematic equivalent of a teenager repeatedly saying “fuck” at the Christmas dinner table and sculpting a cock and balls out of some sprouts and a carrot on grandma’s plate when she slips into a senile doze. Yet, since Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich never once pretends to be Schindler’s List, but is instead about a bunch of homicidal Nazi puppets killing the “un-Aryan” and “mongrel races”  in a series of outrageously unpleasant ways, this brusquely adolescent approach works, I admit, pretty well.

It would have worked a whole lot better if the script and direction had been a bit tighter, but I guess that might be asking a bit much from a movie about homicidal Nazi puppets. Also, the script is by S. Craig Zahler, whose star is currently somewhat in the ascendant. His earlier weird Western movie Bone Tomahawk (2015) was itself impressive despite some infelicities in the script (Oh, c’mon, the guy with the wounded leg does all that? Really Seriously? No, give over). I’ve not seen his last two as they sound hilariously butch; obviously I will see them as I enjoy hilariously butch movies but, y’know, it’s not a priority. I guess what I’m saying is I hope their scripts are substantially less slack than the two S. Craig Zahler scripts I have sat through, highly enjoyable hokum though they both were. After all no one wants to suggest the “S” in S Craig Zahler stands for “Sloppy”. The less buzzworthy pairing of Laguna and Wiklund direct with a lack of clarity in the action scenes and a lack of interest in the inaction scenes, but it’ll do. Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich’s multiple rough edges could even (maybe?) be taken as a further loving call-back to the ‘80s schlock it so dearly yearns to ape.

Such technical folderol barely matters though as Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich can weather a little sloppiness since it is genuinely pretty funny, and heroically eye rollingly grotesque. I’m not proud; that kind of thang buys a lot of goodwill chez Mundano. Also, it’s clearly anti-Nazi so that’s good, because I’m all about being anti-Nazi. Other than the overall and pervasive (and correctly so) anti-Nazi business Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich takes very little seriously. It even starts like a joke when…”A Nazi walks into a bar…” This particular Nazi is an aged Andre Toulon (cinema legend Udo kier) and the bar is in Texas in the 1980s. Upset when the barmaid rebuffs his creepy and, frankly, rather vulgar advances, Toulon is incandescent with rage to learn she is a lesbian and later sets his puppets on her and her lover. (The puppets? It’s a long story; they tell it, don’t worry.) The police follow a series of tiny footprints from the crime scene and Toulon is shot dead by the police. Following this muddled and poorly paced opening, we fast forward to 2018 and find freshly divorced man-child, comic book store employee and comic creator Edgar Easton (a deadpan Thomas Lennon) moving back into his parents’ home. Apparently his brother died years ago in a  horrific accident (this might be  a reference to an earlier Puppet Master opus; I don’t care) so Edgar decides to auction off his brother’s disquieting Toulon “Blade” (no, not Wesley Snipes) puppet at a conveniently imminent and conveniently nearby Toulon convention.

In the least believable event in a movie replete with unbelievable events, Edgar, the newly divorced man-child, comic book shop employee who has just moved back in with his parents, immediately cops off with his hot neighbour. And yes, that is less likely than an undead Nazi controlling an army of puppets from within his tomb, which is just next to his house in defiance of all zoning laws known to man. Anyway, Edgar and Ashley set off for the convention along with Edgar’s  irascible schmuck of a boss Markowitz (a movie stealing Nelson Franklin). What with their hotel being full of convention guests, most of whom have brought a Toulon puppet to sell, it is to be fervently hoped an undead Nazi doesn’t take control of the army of puppets from within his tomb which is just next to his house in defiance of all zoning laws known to man. Oy vey, I should cocoa!

There then follows a series of inventively gross death scenes as the Nazi controlled puppets lay siege to the guests within the hotel cum killing ground. It would be pretty poor show to spoil any of these kills as they are the meat of the meal here, but I did at least twice wonder how they had got away with what I had just witnessed. So, y’know, maybe not a date movie? Certainly not a movie for people hot on plot. Or even characterisation; although the bulk of the characters are well done, that’s largely down to the performances. Thomas Lennon is drily amusing as the lead and Jenny Pellicer as Ashley, the neighbour with unfeasible taste in men, is better than her underwritten role deserves. Nelson Franklin pretty much makes the movie his with a hilarious performance as a strangely vulnerable bundle of offensiveness. If people wrote theses about Puppet Master movies one might be written about how his vulnerability and offensiveness embody the movie in microcosm. But a world in which people penned theses about Puppet Master movies would be a pretty dumb one, so scratch that thought. Everyone else portrays quirky cannon fodder, and while some are, uh, substantially less than good at the whole “acting” thing, luckily they are the ones who get dispatched fastest. The best ones are the ones you wish would make it. Like Cuddly Bear, a ridiculously entertaining turn by Skeeta Jenkins, and Charlyn Yi as Nerissa, an anime lover who you will dearly wish had better eyesight. And of course there must be a special mention for Genre Legend Barbara Crampton, who here displays her knack for comedy as the lightly disdainful ex-cop cum Toulon Tour guide.

Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich is a movie built around scenes of ridiculously unpleasant gore, and they are ridiculously unpleasant indeed, so it scores highly there. It’s also heavily reliant on offensive humour but it’s really more amusing than it is offensive. I certainly laughed a lot, but y’know, I’m nearly 50 and I’m watching a movie called Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich entirely of my own volition. So bear that in mind at all times. The best joke might not even have been intentional, because in Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich after the fall of The Third Reich the world is so full of the kinds of people the Nazis tried to eradicate that it’s like the Nazis never existed. For all its Sturm und Drang, for all its Edginess, for all its attempts to play the Bad Boy card, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich laughs longest and hardest at the Nazis. Because, as any fule kno, that’s all the Nazis are worth. Unlike the Nazis, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich, however, is worth your time even if only for the scene involving an irate Nelson Franklin, a certain “Baby Hitler” and an oven. Shalom, motherfuckers! Shaaaaloooooooom!

[johnnymundano]

Great Comic Book Panels

From Batman: Dark Allegiances (DC Comics, 1996) by Howard Chaykin (after Jack Welch)

[johnnymundano]

Phantom of Death (1988) (AKA Off Balance)

Directed by Ruggero Deodato

Screenplay by Gianfranco Clerici, Vincenzo Mannino and Gigliola Battaglini

Story by Gianfranco Clerici and Vincenzo Mannino

Music by Pino Donnagio

Country: Italy

Running Time: 90 minutes

CAST

Michael York as Robert Dominici

Donald Pleasence as Inspector Datti

Edwige Fenech as Helene Martell

Mapi Galan as Susanna

Fabio Sortar as Davide

Renato Cortesi as Agent Marchi

Antonella Ponziani as Gloria Datti

Carola Stagnaro as Dr. Carla Pesenti

Daniele Brado as Dr. Vanni

Caterina Boratto as Robert's mother

Ruggero Deodato as man at train station who lights cigarette and then gets on the back of his girlfriend’s scooter

Phantom of Death is a giddily entertaining Italian horror muddle with far more serious themes than one might reasonably expect from director Ruggero Deodato, the man known as “The Cannibal King”. My legal advisers have urged me to specify that this isn’t because Ruggero Deodato is actually the ruler of a bunch of people eaters, but because he directed Last Cannibal World (1977) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980), both of which were hugely successful and are still cited today as significant influences on horror. (This doesn’t mean they are any good, mind.)  Phantom of Death takes on a far more universal horror than going into a jungle and being turned into pulled long pork by cannibals; the fear of ageing and also the horror of realising you’ve run out of time to stop being a dick and actually do something worthwhile with your life.

When the movie opens fantastic pianist Robert Dominici (Michael York) is definitely a dick. Robert revels in the adoration which comes with looking like Michael York and playing the piano by moving your shoulders and making intense faces while keeping your hands hidden. Unfortunately he revels in it to the detriment of his personal interactions. He’s a bit of a dick with the chicks, basically. Time is of the essence both in life and in Phantom of Death, so it doesn’t hang about; opening with Robert’s public tinkling of the ivories intercut with the stalking and slashing of a young woman. Yes, because this is a 1980’s Italian horror movie and so some maniac is going around slashing young women to death. Quicker than you can say “Liberace” the roster of victims expands to include Robert’s girlfriend. Unfortunately for Robert not only do the police led by Inspector Datti (Donald Pleasence) find him stood over her gory corpse, but earlier the pair had had a tiff. It seems pretty clear then that Phantom of Death will be a giallo, and Robert is odds on to be our typically ill-equipped sleuth. Yes, given the way Phantom of Death has gone thus far viewers could very well be forgiven for expecting a choppily edited, intrusively scored, minor giallo, notable mostly for the amount of blood it thinks a human neck can spurt and the presence of Michael York, Donald Pleasence and Edwige Fenech. Which would be fine by me, but Phantom of Death has other, higher ideas. If you’d rather be surprised by them then stop reading NOW.

It should be borne in mind at all times that any praise from hereonin is directed at a movie directed by someone called The Cannibal King; a movie that most normal people would dismiss as “godawful bloody nonsense” (as my Life Partner has opined of my viewing choices on numerous occasions). But if you are okay with the peculiar charms of the Italian horror movies of the 1970s and 1980s (or Christ-like in your tolerance for their failings) then Phantom of Death may be right up your (dimly lit) alley. Particularly impressive is the conviction with which it sets up the viewer to expect a giallo. The opening itself is a suave misdirection in the true giallo style; the two events, piano playing and lady slaying, are not occurring simultaneously, but you naturally assume they are. Then, and it’s quite ballsy this, Robert is given a personal reason to pursue the killer when he is found by the police at the scene of his girlfriend’s murder. He can’t possibly be the murder because it would be to obvious, you think. You think wrong. Admittedly Phantom of Death doesn’t let you think wrong for long, it soon makes it clear what’s going on, because it needs to start the real business of the movie; positioning Robert as a tragic killer, himself the victim of a killer, the disease progeria (AKA Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome).

Now, I’m not a medical professional but I’m going to assume that Phantom of Death takes a little (cough!) artist licence and that progeria itself doesn’t usually cause irresistible homicidal impulses. It’s probably hard to tell since in the real world it manifests in children, who, sadly, usually fail to reach the age of 13. As well as the symptoms required by a 1980s Italian horror movie, Robert also experiences the more usual symptoms of progeria which resemble rapid aging, with death resulting from heart ailments or strokes. Robert’s basically got the real world equivalent of Methuselah Syndrome from Blade Runner (1982) but on fast forward. No wonder he goes a bit loopy. When he isn’t killing women and playing cat and mouse with an increasingly distraught Inspector Datti, Robert indulges in the maudlin activities familiar from many serious Oscar® winning Sad Disease movies. He visits his first love for a bittersweet reminiscence, mournfully watches from afar a child afflicted with the selfsame disease, adopts a stray dog and talks to it soulfully about how tragic is his fate to be trapped in this afflicted cage of flesh. Amusingly though, this isn’t a serious Oscar® winning Sad Disease movie, no, it’s a 1980s Italian horror movie and so his first love is a hooker who he visits while dressed as The Phantom of The Opera, and the reunion is ruined by her violent death at his hands; the stricken child is obviously a fully grown dwarf in shorts playing with a ball. The fact that any soulfulness at all is evident under all this silliness is entirely thanks to Michael York.

The (doubtful) success of Phantom of Death is aided no end by Deodata’s cast being  topped by two Legends; the insanely watchable Donald Pleasence and plummy voiced ‘70/’80s heart throb Michael York. York, normally cast as a bland lump,  is pretty great here; obviously relishing the chance to do some acting for once. He evidently recognises it’s a gift of a role; even if it is wrapped in the ostentatiously crazed genre trappings and poor editing of a 1980s Italian horror movie. As the young, handsome Robert, York is in his element wallowing in the feminine attention but surprisingly, as Robert gets older, more scared and ever madder York’s performance keeps pace. It’s possible he might be overdoing it, but since he’s acting from inside steadily accumulating layers of 1980s prosthetic face make-up and a pair of fake brown teeth any hamminess is muted, leaving only a bizarrely touching performance.

Donald Pleasence, as Inspector Datti, gets less to do but manfully struggles to forge a character from some pretty dull dialogue. He is a charmingly concerned father to his daughter and a determined hunter of the mystery killer. When Robert’s increasingly deranged telephonic harassment of the cop expands to include his beloved daughter, Datti’s compartmentalised roles collide and Pleasence revels in the slow burn to full blown mania. One of the finest cinematic sights of my life has been seeing Donald Pleasence spinning round a shopping plaza yelling “I kill you! I kill you! Bastard! Kill you! Fucking Bastard! Bastard!” Thank you, Phantom of Death. No thanks though for under-using Edwige Fenech. Yes, gialllo regular Edwige Fenech is also here, speaking English in her own voice for once; but she is more of a niche attraction as she doesn’t have much to do. Obviously, what she does do she does with the usual effortless Fenech panache. Regally sporting terrible, shoulder padded ‘80s styles is the bulk of her role, but she’s mostly there to get pregnant with Robert’s child and so give the climax some emotional resonance among all the screaming and stumbling about. Not many movies end with a savage fight between an arthritic old man and a heavily pregnant woman, but Phantom of Death dares to go there.

Despite initially looking like a run of the mill giallo, Phantom of Death opts instead to try an allegorical rumination on the inescapable nightmare of senescence that awaits those of us who don’t die young. Fret not though, all this high mindedness is done in a relentlessly tasteless fashion. And no serious fan of 1980s Italian horror movies would want it otherwise.

[johnnymundano]

Shut In (2016)

Directed by Farren Blackburn

Screenplay by Christina Hodson

Music by Nathaniel Méchaly

Country: France, Canada

Running time: 91 minutes

CAST

Naomi Watts as Mary Portman

Oliver Platt as Dr. Bennett Wilson

Charlie Heaton as Stephen Portman

David Cubitt as Doug Hart

Jacob Tremblay as Tom Patterson

Clémentine Poidatz as Lucy

Crystal Balint as Grace Mitchell

Alex Braunstein as Aaron Hart

Peter Outerbridge as Richard Portman

Shut In is the kind of glossy, well-acted mainstream thriller I sometimes feel polite society would rather I waste my eyes on, rather than ancient, less than salubrious Italian chillers no one normal cares about. Of course when I do watch a glossy, well-acted mainstream thriller like Shut In I often find they are crap, and thus feel a lot better about watching a paraplegic Donald Pleasance solving crimes with a straight razor wielding chimp. Or whatever the hell was going on in Phenomena (1985). Fun Fact: When I first typed the title of this post it came out of my fingers as Shit In. Subconscious much?

If it was my cheeky little subconscious at work it would be quite apt as that’s what they call “psychology” and Shut In concerns Mary (Naomi Watts), a female child psychologist. Mary works from her isolated home since she also has to care for her step-son Stephen (Charlie Heaton), who is in a vegetative state following a car accident in which his father died. That’s a hard row to hoe, so Mary is herself receiving counselling from Dr. Wilson (Oliver Platt). Things may be starting to look up for poor Mary, as she is contemplatively flicking through care home brochures for Stephen while cautiously reciprocating amorous advances from burly Doug (David Cubitt). When Tom (Jacob Tremblay), a patient Mary has become attached to, goes missing Sarah begins hearing strange noises and dreaming strange dreams. As the days pass Mary starts to fear she is losing her mind, and as a snow storm closes the stage is set for a confrontation as predictable as it is silly.

If you want to enjoy the terribleness of Shut In for yourself you should stop reading there (or here, I guess) as I am going to SPOIL it by talking about how awful it is. Unfortunately it is impossible to get across quite how offensively dumb Shut In is without SPOILING it. Or at least, I’m not going to bother finding a way because, hey, life’s too short. And, let’s face it Shut In SPOILS itself by being awful. The set-up is good but, c’mon, who can’t see what’s coming?  In the interests of fairness I tried to hide it in the synopsis, but if you watch the movie it’s as predictable as the fact this sentence will end with a full stop. The whole movie is a kind of exercise in flop sweated desperation as it frogmarches its plot into the ridiculous convolutions required to make this insipid bullshittery “work”. And for all its huffing and puffing Shut in still doesn’t work. It’s not even that you can see what’s coming, a Gay Pride float in a Gay Pride Parade has more subtlety, it’s that it all makes no sense whatsoever. In comparison Body Double (1984) looks like a documentary. Shut In doesn’t just require you to suspend your disbelief, it requires you to hang it by the neck until dead.

Shut In is set in a world of idiots, where someone can be diagnosed as being in a vegetative state following a car smash, with the only check being that they haven’t moved much since they were admitted. Apparently nobody has done any tests on Stephen during the 6 months since the crash other than looking at him and deciding he hasn’t moved. Cunningly though, Stephen only moves when nobody is around. He just, you know, “knows” when nobody is around, and so has never been caught once in 6 months. He must be the only teenager in existence who has never been surprised by his parent when doing something he shouldn’t be doing. During those 6 months Mary has been taking care of Stephen’s every need; feeding, bathing and whatevering him. At no point during the 6 months of Mary pushing baby food into his mouth or sponging his Gentleman Jim in the bath has he once broken cover. As Stephen Charlie Heaton (from TV’s ‘80s nostalgia bath and merchandise generator Stranger Things) is okay, but he plays an impossible character. “Evil man-child with preternatural levels of self-control” would task anyone to imbue it with believability. He tries, bless him but ends up as just a common or garden movie nutter.  

Naomi Watts is fantastic, but Naomi Watts is always fantastic. Unfortunately for Naomi Watts being fantastic isn’t enough here. She’s like a solid core of believability around which a load of noisy, ridiculous bullshit revolves, constantly reminding you that Naomi Watts should be doing something better with her time. Maybe she took the role as some kind of audition tape, she does get to do a whole load of acting after all; doting mother, crazy lady, fierce protector and drug addled goofball. Because for Shut In’s plot to work (it doesn’t) Stephen has to slip her his pills which cause her to get way spacy. Okay,  I’m not a medical professional so maybe they do medicate shut-ins with the kind of drugs Stephen uses to put a crimp in Mary’s reality. Sure, it’s possible that shut-ins are basically doped up and tripping balls all the time in there, but I doubt it. if any medical professionals would like to take the time out of their busy schedule to defend the use of medication in Shut In, you know where to find me. Oh, and poor old lovable Oliver Platt plays a psychiatrist who provides face-time therapy before the script forces him to emulate the Scatman Crothers role in Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). At times, in fact, you can almost hear Shut In grunt with the effort to emulate The Shining, but all it does is make you want to watch The Shining rather than Shut In.

What’s worse is how nasty the (barely sub-) subtext of Shut  In is; it seems, intentionally or not, to be that as soon as they reach adolescence you should maybe give some serious thought to killing your kids before they kill you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie as fearful of children growing up. And I’ve seen Christine (1983) more than once. And, yeah, Stephen is Mary’s step-son not her birth son, but that’s obviously just pathetic cowardice on the scriptwriter’s part. It all gets a bit Oedipal in there towards the end, which would be supremely creepy if he was her natural son, and Shut In just isn’t that low class, thanks. It would have been better if Shut In had grasped the nettle and gone low, because supremely creepy is at least interesting. And the movie ends up being supremely creepy accidentally anyway, with its emphasis on kids being monsters once they won’t let you chuch their chubby cheeks anymore. The “feel good” ending is truly horrible. Mary ends up adopting the tiny, cute moppet Tom after killing her own son, Stephen. A smarter movie would have gone in hard on this nastiness and left you uncertain about whether she’ll be violently trading in Tom too once his balls drop. Basically, Shut In needed to be a lot nastier and far smarter, it needed someone like Brian de Palma to work. But there is no one else like Brian De Palma, and so Shut In doesn’t have Brian De Palma, and so it doesn’t work.

Seriously, Shut In is so bad it’s baffling. It looks like the kind of movie mums and dads like, it’s got a great cast, it’s civilly filmed and there’s an onus on suspense rather than gore. I’m not averse to that myself on occasion, but then I am a dad. But, Christ, the plot to this thing is so ridiculous it should star George Hilton and Edwige Fenech and come in a banana yellow blu-ray case, with a commentary track by Troy Howarth consisting of him just laughing for 91 minutes. 

[johnnymundano]

Paganini Horror (1989)

Directed by Luigi Cozzi

Screenplay by Luigi Cozzi and Daria Nicolodi

Music by Vince Tempera

Country: Italy

Running time: 82 minutes

CAST

Daria Nicolodi as Sylvia Hackett

Jasmine Maimone as Kate

Pascal Persiano as Daniel

Maria Cristina Mastrangeli as Lavinia

Michel Klippstein as Elena

Pietro Genuardi as Mark Singer

Luana Ravegnini as Rita

Giada Cozzi as Sylvia (child)

Elena Pompei as Sylvia's mother

Donald Pleasence as Mr. Pickett

Paganini Horror is a terrible 1989 Italian horror movie set in a decrepit Venetian villa where a terrible (mostly) girl pop group film a terrible video for a terrible song based on the terrible idea of using cursed music by Paganini. The aural nonsense these tinsel wits conjure summons the cranky spirit of the deceased composer to dispatch them one by one in imaginative, but seriously underfunded ways. And probably to stop them screaming, because, hoo boy, do these ladies scream. If you are a massive fan of women screaming Paganini Horror is the movie for you, my unusual friend. Much of the running time of Paganini Horror involves neither Paganini nor horror but rather women running around what seems like one corridor and three rooms screaming. Occasionally they all meet up and scream at each other in the same room, or that one bloody corridor. I swear at some points they bounce up and down and flap their hands while screaming like overwrought teenagers at a pop concert.

Which is ironic since they are a pop group themselves. They are the kind of fantastically talented (mostly) girl band who do the female cause no favours at all; the kind who play their guitars by keeping their fingers immobile and flat on the strings while provocatively moving their hips about while pulling faces which suggest they are experiencing a sexy form of menstrual cramp. The singer, Kate (Jasmine Maimone), doesn’t have an instrument because she is too busy prancing about, trying to see which she can open wider, her eyes or her mouth. The token bloke, Daniel (Pascal Persiano), is stuck behind the drums because no one wants to see his exposed belly button. I think they sing Bon Jovi’s terrible “You Give Love a Bad Name” but it’s kind of hard to tell. Anyway, they are so bad the movie doesn’t give the band a name (I think; I don’t really care), so we’ll call them The Chilblains. Whatever song The Chilblains are excreting, it isn’t good enough for their producer Lavinia (Maria Cristina Mastrangeli) whose ears apparently work,  so Kate and Lavinia shout at each other, and things get so heated that Kate almost pushes a stool over but Lavinia arrests its fall just in time. Rock and roll Babylon! The Chilblains need new material to get them another million seller, and fast!

Daniel, the male drummer, sources some groovy material which will get the band back on track by, apropos of nothing, meeting a twitchy Donald Pleasence in a disused warehouse and purchasing a lost Paganini composition. Apparently, actually writing some decent music fails to occur to Daniel. The girls go wild for the fab synthed up sounds of groovy Paganini, and Lavinia books them into a spooky old house Paganini once passed water in, now owned by Daria Nicolodi’s Sylvia Hackett. The idea is to get top horror director Mark Singer (Pietro Genuardi) to make a smashing pop vid and get The Chilblains back shifting millions again. Unfortunately the video is shit. Even more unfortunately the restless spirit of Paganini is so upset by his music being co-opted  by talentless chancers that it starts knocking them off in unintentionally amusing ways. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a woman burned alive in a poorly constructed giant violin case, baby.

Niccolò Paganini (b.1782) was a real person who probably didn’t live to see a woman burned alive in a poorly constructed giant violin case, but he was a legendarily amazeballs Genoan violinist. While Paganini Horror is hardly a fit cinematic tribute, he is a good choice for a spooky killer. Much like Cher, he is purported to have consorted with the devil, selling his soul in return for prodigious talent. Back then, see, there were no video games or movies for unimaginative reactionaries to blame everything on, so in desperation bits of wood that could make sounds such as the violin were considered the “devil’s instrument”, indicative of poor moral character and likely to cause an excess of excitement. And so extravagant was Paganini’s talent that it was thought only a satanic source could explain it. Or, y’know, he was talented and practiced a lot. Your call. Paganini died in 1840, possibly from mercury poisoning from being treated for syphilis. Maybe from tuberculosis. I don’t know, what am I, a historian? Paganini’s spookiness survived after his death to the extent that he wasn’t laid to rest until 1876, when priests finished debating what they should do with him. Priests apparently had a lot of time on their hands back then. None of that matters since all Paganini Horror is bothered about is Paganini was very musical and a little bit eerie.

Unfortunately looking up Niccolò Paganini on The Internet turns out to be a lot more exciting than watching Paganini Horror. Particularly finding out that all his teeth fell out from his syphilis treatment. But if you are inclined towards terrible Italian horror movies Paganini Horror has the odd slender wisp of a delight. There’s the ever twinkly Donald Pleasence, being all sinister and stuff; and you get quite  a bit more of him than I was expecting, which is nice. Unsatisfactory Italian horror movies form a  magical late stage in Pleasence’s career, where he basically rocks up acting in a movie which exists only in his head, and ends up being the most interesting thing in the movie outside of his head. Although genre legend (and co-scripter) Daria Nicolodi is intermittently to be seen acting, mostly she just goes with the whole screaming thing. Michel Klippstein as Elena is the best thing in the movie, but not for her acting. Unfortunately it’s because for the bulk of the movie she wears a nasty green lycra jump suit studded with a nonsensical pattern of holes. It’s kind of fascinating in a wholly abysmal way. Paganini Horror isn’t always terribly interesting so you may often find your mind wandering, wondering just how sweaty Michel Klippstein’s get-up got. I bet they had to burn that outfit once the filming stopped. Ew! In the interests of decorum I shall draw a discreet veil of “mostly adequate” over the other performances.

About on a par with the less than impressive acting is Luigi Cozzi’s relentlessly apathetic direction which exacerbates rather than disguises the clearly near lethal budgetary constraints. But would any more money have helped a horror movie helmed by someone so determined to so cluelessley fart away every death scene? Probably not. Make no mistake, Paganini Horror is not only terrible but, worse, it is often quite boring. This is quite a feat since the killer wears a gold mask and looks like a low budget musketeer prancing about and, as comically awesome as it is regrettably underutilised, there is also a gold violin with a spring loaded blade in the base. It’s like Cozzi has accepted a bet to make everything as tedious as humanly possible. In theory Paganini Horror has some clever ideas and creative slaughter, in practice however it is a drearily slow crawl punctuated by tedious screaming and hilariously cheap-shit SFX shenanigans. The best (i.e. worst) example is “The Invisible Barrier” which elicits some fantastic (i.e. rubbish) mime action as our cast pretend to be pushing against something that isn’t there, it also has a car crash into it but…off-screen! and a character is crushed to death by it, which just means the crew press a sheet of glass onto her face to distort it. Eyerolling never had it so good.

Be warned, sensation seekers of all ages, sure, Paganini Horror all sounds very camp and cheesetastic, but it is neither campy nor cheesy enough. It takes some  weird anti-talent to render dull a movie which has a record producer who can identify a fungus by sight as being one used in the 18th century to give Stradivarius violins their unique sound. (I believe Kanye West has the same ability.) Don’t be fooled if any of that sounds fun; Paganini Horror is fun, but not fun enough by far. This Italian mis-fire is fit only for masochistic die-hards like myself rather than your average horror punter up for a good time. Ultimately then, not so much a case of Paganini Horror, but rather Paganini Torpor.

[johnnymundano]

Giallo (2009)

Directed by Dario Argento

Screenplay by Jim Agnew, Sean Keller and Dario Argento

Music by Marco Werba

Country: Italy

Running time: 92 minutes

CAST

Adrien Brody as Inspector Enzo Avolfi

Flavio Volpe as Giallo

Emmanuelle Seigner as Linda

Elsa Pataky as Celine

Robert Miano as Inspector Mori

Silvia Spross as Russian Victim

Giuseppe Lo Console as Butcher

Luis Molteni as Sal

Lorenzo Pedrotti as Delivery Boy

Daniela Fazzolari as Sophia

Valentina Izumi as Keiko

Taiyo Yamanouchi as Toshi

Sato Oi as Midori

Maryann McIver as Girl In Bookstore

Barbara Mautino as Nurse

Massimo Franceschi as Coroner

Liam Riccardo as Baby Yellow

Anna Varello as Butcher's Wife

Giancarlo Judica Cordiglia as Desk Sergeant

Nicolò Morselli as Young Enzo

Farhad Re as Designer

Patrick Oldani as Officer Gian Luca

Andrea Redavid as Officer #1

Linda Messerlinker as Girl Victim

By rights Giallo should be called Marrone. As in brown, as in crap. I’m not saying it reflects poorly on Dario Argento’ skills in 2009 but…but you could have an art installation in the Tate Modern with one screen playing Deep Red (1975) next to a screen playing Giallo and just call it “Time’s Cruel Hand at Play”. Okay, I am saying Giallo reflects poorly on Dario Argento’s skills in 2009. What is most surprising about Giallo is not learning Adrien Brody sued the producers but learning that he didn’t do so because the movie was so bad. (He actually did it because they hadn’t paid him all his fee; which is also a really good reason to sue them.) Giallo is a giallo called Giallo, directed by the modern master of giallo himself, Dario Argento. And it’s not very good. Some of Giallo is excruciatingly bad in fact, admittedly like much of the wayward genre of giallo itself. But one expects better from Dario Argento.

In a listlessly lit but still visually arresting Turin young, beautiful foreign ladies are being abducted, tortured, killed and dumped. Even in bawdy Italy this behaviour is frowned upon, and maverick, rogue, loose-cannon cop Enzo Avolfi (Adrien Brody) is on the hunt for the maniacally sadistic killer. When young, beautiful, foreign model Celine (Elsa Pataky) is snatched, her visiting slightly older, slightly less beautiful, equally foreign sister, Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner) badgers Enzo remorselessly until he has no choice but to have her accompany him on his investigation, completely contravening every procedure in the police manual.  But Enzo is a roguetastic maverick, so there you go. Can the mismatched duo find Celine in time? Will love blossom? Will the torture of young, beautiful, foreign ladies make you feel a bit seedy? Will sense play second fiddle to style? Will the killer’s set piece demise be a thing of ridiculous beauty? How daft will the clues be? Yes, the usual giallo questions apply. Unfortunately the answers are less satisfying than most giallo by quite some distance.

Which is a shame. I don’t want to overstate this but if we can’t rely on Dario Argento, of all people, to provide a decent giallo then what’s the point of us having left the oceans for the land in the first place! Anyone, as am I, familiar with Argento’s movies up to Opera (1987) will likely be unimpressed at best by Giallo. (Getting hold of his movies after Opera in the UK requires effort, effort which I’m not entirely sure their quality will repay. See: Giallo) The awfulness of Giallo is utterly mystifying unless 1987 to 2009 was a period of implacable decline for Argento. I mean, it doesn’t even look very good. The first thing anyone associates with Dario Argento is his weird need to film his daughter in the nude, but the second thing is: style. Giallo, the genre, is all about style, unfortunately Giallo, the movie, has very little style. It has some style; Argento can’t entirely avoid picking the odd good angle, or visually interesting location. But mostly it’s lit in a really underwhelming way, it all looks a bit TV, in short. And the torture is a bit much too; it’s as though Argento has taken all that sado-nonsense like Hostel (2005) as a challenge. Unfortunately, it’s a challenge Giallo lowers itself to with unseemly haste and distasteful success. These grubby interludes puncture any of the necessary dreamlike surrealism a top tier giallo requires.

Every now and again Giallo does try for the necessary operatic ambience though. Mainly in the flashbacks  to Enzo’s violent past. These are so good, so stylish and so startlingly direct in their violence that they seem like refugees from a different movie, one Argento is far more interested in. He certainly seems decidedly more apathetic about the rest of Giallo. It all, presumably, is intended to build to a shocking climax between Enzo and Linda which deliberately kneecaps any nobility the viewer has lazily projected onto our cop protagonist. Unfortunately this crucial scene is filmed with such a lack of energy that it merely evokes a disgruntled wife shrieking at her husband as he stalks off to the pub instead of washing the car like he’d promised. 

The best thing in Giallo is Adrien Brody. But not because he’s good. Although, he is quite good as the cop, Enzo Avolfi, with his mannered walk and Bronx rasp. Brody’s acting really hard here, and in his head you can tell he’s acting the part of a physically much bigger man, which is quite entertaining to watch. He’s only a slight fella after all. (!!SPOILERS!!) Unfortunately he also plays the totally separate role of the killer, Giallo by name, in a move which can be most generously described as misguided. I mean, I get it, I get the rationale. They, the cop and the killer, are two sides of the same coin. (I didn’t say it was original). So why not get the same guy to play them both? Conceptually that’s quite smart and partially atones for another plod through familiar “There but for the grace of God…” territory. But, hoo boy, does Brody misplay Giallo. I mean, woof! I mean, woof! Woof! First of all he’s hampered by a big yellow prosthetic face, a curly wig and a poorly judged sweatband. That, obviously, isn’t ridiculous enough so Brody adds a cod-Italian accent more suited to a lightly racist 1970s sit-com about foreign students learning English. “Prreeeteee! Bee-yoo-ti-fowl! Pretteee!” he chirrups repeatedly, but the nadir is when he hisses “Shuduppayamawf!” as he injects a struggling woman’s tongue with a sedative. Essentially Giallo disembowels itself by having a killer who resembles a melting Sylvester Stallone waxwork and talks like a homicidal comedy Italian waiter. 

So, yes, Giallo is entertaining but for all the wrong reasons. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the misfires in wait, I wouldn’t want to kill all the pleasure of Giallo. But I will mention that Emmanuelle Seigner acts throughout the movie as though someone has told her that if she moves her face it will crack into a thousand pieces. Oh, and…but, no, enough. Trust me, Giallo isn’t a good movie, it isn’t even a good giallo. From Dario Argento that’s a shame, but, hey, we’ll always have Deep Red.

[johnnymundano]

Fear in the Night (1972) (AKA Dynasty of Fear and Honeymoon of Fear)

Directed by Jimmy Sangster

Screenplay by Jimmy Sangster and Michael Syson

Music by John McCabe

Country: United Kingdom

Running time: 94 minutes

CAST

Judy Geeson as Peggy Heller

Ralph Bates as Robert Heller

Joan Collins as Molly Carmichael

Peter Cushing as Michael Carmichael

James Cossins as The Doctor

Gillian Lind as Mrs. Beamish

John Bown as 1st Policeman

Brian Grellis as 2nd Policeman

(I watched Fear in The Night on a StudioCanal blu-ray. The picture was perfectly fine, but not “Holy Mother of Pearl!” amazing. But I doubt the movie has ever looked better)

Fear in The Night is a neat enough Hammer thriller (as opposed to a neat enough Hammer horror) from their 1970s Going Downhill period, as the studio tried to accommodate the tastes of a rapidly changing society while not altering very much about their product, and continuing to spend less and less with every movie. Surprisingly often ‘70s Hammer’s answer to this thorny art versus commerce conundrum would be to just stick some tits in. Thankfully Hammer doesn’t do that here, instead they opt for a twisted thriller riffing on the French suspense classic Diabolique (1955), with a subtle hint of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. But, you know, with Joan Collins and, the eternally camptastic Joan Collins aside, imbued with all the everyday glamour of the 1970s; which is to say all the glamour of the aftermath of a chip pan fire.

This penny pinching presentation of the ‘70s milieu turns out to be Fear in the Night’s secret weapon in its arsenal of entertainment. Movies like this probably looked cheap on release (fair enough, because they were cheap movies) but several decades on the financial inability to cinematically accentuate mundane reality provides a wonderful glimpse of a time mostly past. (Admittedly there remain odd pockets of the 1970s in the UK to this day, but that’s another story.) While I love watching these things for all the usual reasons, I also enjoy the no frills historical accuracy of them. (See also: Amicus and Trigon movies.) An accidental bonus of budgetary miserliness, perhaps, but a bonus nonetheless.  Early on before Fear in the Night settles into its cramped arena of psychological combat there’s a particularly great bit at a motorway service station, where you can see that they once sold 12” LPs in spinner racks; on your way to see Aunty Maud, why not pick up the new Peters and Lee platter? Weird stuff, but apparently true. This is only rivalled by the man in the background when Judy and Ralph are in the car park; this unknown guy comes out of the Gents and is captured forever on film checking his fly. Cinéma doesn’t get much more vérité than a guy reflexively checking his cock’s not hanging out.

But why are Ralph Bates and Judy Geeson in a car park at a Granada motorway service station? (I just checked and there are still Granada motorway service stations; I did not know that.) It’s because Ralph and Judy are playing newlywed couple Robert and Peggy, on their way to the boys’ boarding school Robert teaches at. Their fragrant wedded bliss hit a recent road bump when Peggy was possibly attacked by a home invader with a prosthetic arm. Or possibly not; Peggy doesn’t seem the full shilling right from the start. Whatever did or didn’t happen has left Peggy in a somewhat sensitive state which imminent plot developments will do nothing to soothe and everything to aggravate. The pair move into a small house near the main school building and Peggy meets the headmaster, the confusingly named Michael Carmichael (Peter Cushing), and his wife Molly (Joan Collins). All you need to know about Molly is that she is played by 1970s Joan Collins; ergo she is a nasty piece of work under all that make-up. Michael Carmichael is a bit harder to get a grip on, partly because he is played by Peter Cushing who always finds nuances in his characters his scripts rarely deserve. He’s the best thing in Fear in the Night, but then he’s the best thing in most things that have “Peter Cushing” in the cast list. Yes, including Star Wars (1977). Actually, especially Star Wars (1977). Peter Cushing isn’t in Fear in the Night much, but he’s in it enough for him to create a character who can twitch from affable gent to spaced out creep in the blink of an eye and still leave you undecided as to whether or not to trust him. It’s called acting, darling.

Besides the ever potent screen presence of Peter Cushing, everyone else in the intentionally claustrophobically tiny cast is good value too. Joan Collins is Joan Collins, which is why they cast her, I guess. Ralph Bates has fun being too good to be true, before revealing he is in fact too good to be true. (Not really a spoiler unless you’ve never seen a movie; see further down the page.) Mostly though we chez Mundano were distracted by his appearance. Throughout Fear in the Night Ralph Bates is a kind of variable orange colour with some dusky eye shadows, courtesy of make-up according to my Life Partner; I thought he was just olive skinned and maybe had a bit of Mediterranean in the branches of his family tree. And I may have the edge since Wikipedia tells me Ralph was of French parentage and was (get this) the great-great grandson of Louis Pasteur. There’s a fun Hammer Fact for you; no charge. The core of Fear in the Night, however, is Judy Geeson, who is unrelated to Louis Pasteur as far as I know, but, luckily for audiences everywhere, successfully portrays a woman slowly coming so unstuck she can’t even trust her own senses. Hysteria simmers under the surface of each of her scenes, at least in those scenes where her hysteria isn’t stealing the scene wholesale.

Oh yes, female hysteria is front and centre in this one. Fear in the Night has a typically balanced 1970s approach to the ladies; one’s a brassy shrew and the other is a hysterical girl-child. In case anyone wanted reassurance about how far we’ve come since 1972 gender-wise, Fear in the Night also has a lot of people telling Peggy and Molly how pretty they are, like they are delicate little dolls, and there’s not a few “Oh, those silly ladies and their silly emotions!” reactions to Peggy’s increasingly frenzied appeals for help against her apparently phantom assailant. The only reason no one seeks to blame it all on her “time of the month”, I suspect, is that the ‘70s was still struggling to come to terms with female biological functions. Part of Peggy’s problem is getting men to take her seriously; which is fair enough, as part of any woman’s problems in the 1970s was getting men to take her seriously. In the 2010s men take women seriously; but they hate them for it. But shhhh, it’s a secret.

There are a lot of secrets at play in Fear in the Night, some obvious and some surprising but can Peggy survive their unveiling? You will, naturally, have already twigged what’s going on as soon as Joan Collins turns up shotgunning rabbits and patronising Peggy to within an inch of her life. But, and this is the clever bit, Fear in the Night knows you know this. The initial reveal is so defiantly perfunctory it acts as a kind of slap in the face to your complacency, and then Fear in the Night kicks you in the kidneys with the stuff you weren’t expecting. Basically, don’t organise that ticker tape parade to celebrate your own cleverness until Fear in the Night’s credits roll. Despite Jimmy Sangster’s smart plotting relying heavily on a prosthetic arm, Fear in the Night still has room for a couple of enjoyably nifty tricks up its sleeve. If all else fails; it’s got peter Cushing in. And you can’t argue with a bit of The Cush.  And that’s another Hammer Fact; no charge.

[johnnymundano]

The Shout (1978)

Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski

Screenplay by Jerzy Skolimowski and Michael Austin

Based on the Short Story by Robert Graves

Music by Tony Banks and Michael Rutherford

Country: United Kingdom

Running time: 86 minutes

CAST

Alan Bates as Crossley

Susannah York as Rachel Fielding

John Hurt as Anthony Fielding

Robert Stephens as Chief Medical Officer

Tim Curry as Robert Graves

Julian Hough as Vicar

Carol Drinkwater as Cobbler’s Wife

Jim Broadbent as Fielder in cowpat

Susan Wooldridge as Harriet

The Shout is a valiantly bonkers ‘70s movie curiosity as star-studded as it is puzzling and as puzzling as it is entertaining. So starry is the cast that Brit thesp mainstay Jim Broadbent is reduced to being billed as  “fielder in cowpat”. So bizarre is The Shout that he actually, literally plays a cricket fielder who actually, literally falls into a cowpat. This may be the only instance during The Shout’s duration that things are exactly as they seem. But basics first: What’s The Shout about? Um, I wouldn’t like to say. Which is apt because The Shout adores uncertainty. However, I can in all certainty say that The Shout is the finest movie ever directed by one of the cast of Avengers Assemble (2012). Because when Jerzy Skolimowski isn’t playing a KGB goon getting his ass whipped by Scarlett Johannsen’s stunt double in overlong multiplex pablum he is a Polish movie director of no small artistic renown. Admittedly, this is the only movie of his I’ve ever seen, despite his decades long career, but if you’re only going to watch one Jerzy Skolimowski movie The Shout isn’t a bad choice.

Before it spirals off into the utterly bizarre The Shout establishes that it’s the 1970s and Robert Graves (Tim Curry) (Yes, Robert Graves is the author of the short story on which it is based; why, hello, meta!) finds himself scoring a cricket match held in the grounds of an asylum. Stuck in a wooden scoring shed with patient Crossley (Alan Bates), he soon finds himself being told a story about a young couple, Anthony (John Hurt) and Rachel (Susannah York) who live the Little Englander dream of small town life amongst the dunes and scratty grass of Devon. Anthony makes terrible music by recording stuff like, well, not like, but actually in fact…marbles rolling around on a tin tray. It must sell well though  since the pair seem secure and free from fret. Whether or not the fact that The Shout has music by two members of Genesis, a band which produces awful but popular music, is a wry joke I leave for you to decide. In fairness the soundtrack they provide to The Shout is pretty great and totally simpatico with The Shout’s peculiar derangements. Anyway, when not recording a bee in a jam jar Anthony plays the organ in a church where the vicar is so enervated he can’t even be bothered to finish his sermon, while Rachel seems to do nothing but is apparently, according to the identical scenes which bookend the movie, a nurse. Actually, there’s a lot of things seeming to be one thing but turning out to be something else in The Shout. Discombobulation is definitely on the agenda here.

Even Anthony and Rachel’s blissful marriage isn’t what it seems; it’s undermined by Anthony taking the cobbler’s wife for a ride on his bike (which both is and isn’t a saucy euphemism; this is very The Shout indeed). Into this flawed Eden strides surly flâneur Crossley, who (for reasons never explained; which is very The Shout indeed also) engineers a meeting with Anthony and, thanks largely to Anthony’s terribly English fear of causing offence, ends up invading the couple’s home and, ultimately, upending their lives. But The Shout is no ordinary movie and so Crossley is no ordinary hobo; he claims to have lived amongst the aborigines, killed several of his own kids, seen a man die via the “pointing bone” and mastered the “terror shout”; he’s a fellow with a bellow with the power to kill. Anthony’s scorn for the interloper’s apparently preposterous claim is undermined by his own penchant for aural oddities and he soon craves a demonstration; partly to prove Crossley is a deluded loon and partly because…maybe he isn’t? Meanwhile Crossley’s got some somewhat earthier magic hidden up his sleeve and Rachel soon yearns for Crossley to point his thrilling bone at her. It’s just a matter of time before the politeness stalls, the façade falls and madness and murder are unleashed.

The Shout’s basic story is a familiar one; it’s the one about the creepy weirdo who invades a flawed but stable status quo and then proceeds to inveigle their way into a position of power via subterfuge  and mind games; the emphasis is on inversion and psychological subtlety and the male terror of being cuckolded. See also, The Servant (1963). It’s a good story which is why people keep telling it, but The Shout gives it added power and injects an alluring freshness through its decidedly off kilter, atypical  approach. The subtle undercurrent of karmic comeuppance is also deftly done. The whole movie has a slightly woozy feeling like you’ve just woken up from a nap in the hot sun, or you’ve been hitting the cough syrup again. Scenes languorously slip into one another with an imprecision and lack of haste that’s quite jarring given the usual tradition of sharp, clear-cut scene demarcations. 

The Shout’s gently threatening and implacably mounting sense of the uncanny infects everything on screen. As indeed you might expect of a movie studded with visual shout outs to Francis Bacon’s less than placid paintings. People in The Shout wildly surmise the most ridiculous things which turn out to be true, while blithely ignoring the wildly obvious much to their detriment. Everything in The Shout looks normal but slightly off; Anthony and Rachel’s house is, on first appearance, trendily “rustic” but over the course of The Shout it looks weirder and weirder. All the walls are flaking, a window gets broken and no one cares, and unless I’ve led a sheltered life most people don’t have string and wooden pegs stretched from bedroom wall to bedroom wall. Similarly, everyone looks normal but acts in a fashion most generously described as eccentric. The vicar’s sermon is both fiery and lacklustre, the cobbler happily shares bizarre intimacies with Anthony, who himself, lest we forget, plays sardine tins like violins, and Rachel, the most normal of the main players, is soon cavorting nudely  about in thrall to Crossley, like a posh version of Britt Eckland in The Wicker Man (1973). Obviously this being the 1970s there’s not quite as much of the male characters on show as there is of Susannah York; until 1987 it was widely believed in the UK that the sight of a penis on a cinema screen would cause audiences to go blind en masse. In some areas of Somerset this belief persists to this day.

The Shout is not a movie for people who seek certainty or seek the embrace of answers; there’s no shortage of mystery in The Shout, possibly even a surfeit since you’ll still have plenty of questions once the credits roll. But The Shout is obviously the kind of movie that wants to leave its audience baffled but undoubtedly entertained. Raising questions in the audience’s mind is what The Shout is all about, because The Shout is all about the inexplicable and the irrational; to expect it to drape the comfy jumper of closure over your shoulders would be a mistake. Also, The Shout features a finale to a cricket match so abruptly violent and crazed that cricket, which is Rollerball for accountants, momentarily appears interesting. And that’s only one of The Shout’s many destabilising delights.