"Go To Sleep...."

For whatever reason the latter half of the 40s and the early 50s saw very little fanged activity. Vampires had been run into the ground with the rampant revision of the Dracula mythos and guest appearances in terrible comedies. Aside from La Vampiro Negro, an early Argentinean horror film by Román Viñoly Barreto, there wasn't much caped trouble brewed up. Though match point goes to England's Hammer Studios for introducing vampires back to the world's audiences, no one attacked the subject of vampires with quite the same zeal as the Mexicans. After Hammer's Horror of Dracula opened up the fanged floodgates, other countries threw their own entries into the mix but I rather think that Mexicans made the most out of their threadbare source material (though you wouldn't actually be able to find all of Stoker's novel unless you watched every vampire film from 1957 to 1975). Indeed many saw the vampire movie as a way to explore new special effects techniques and as a way to really build a solid genre film industry in their country. If we go back to the very beginning, we have Abel Salazar to thank for some of Mexico's finest horror films. He decided that though acting was going well, he wanted to produce horror films and that's just what he did. His company Cinematográfica ABSA produced around eight horror films before ceasing in 1963 with Curse of the Crying Woman. Aside from the truly bizarre Braniac in 1962 there wasn't really a dud among them but ABSA's vampire films really display his company's strengths. They excelled in gothic horror and could conjure up really awesome visuals when they wanted to.

El Vampiro
by Fernando Méndez

Marta Gonzalez is home to see her aunts, both are apparently sick. Her arrival in their home town should tip you (and her, if she had any sense) off that she's about to endure a weekend full of unspeakable evil. There are no carriages around to take her from the train station to The Sycamores, her family's estate. The surrounding town is filled with superstitious types who scoff at the idea of Marta headed up to her family's house and the only carriage willing to take her is full to bursting with boxes of dirt. She manages a ride halfway to town along with fellow stranded train passenger Enrique (played by Salazar). Enrique seems like affable enough company even if his reason for being in town seems suspect at best. When they arrive at the Sycamores there is a lot of bad news waiting for Marta. Her Aunt Maria Teresa's illness, whatever it was, has claimed her life and Aunt Eloisa seems not so much changed as a completely different, exuberant person. She's rebounded quite nicely from her sister's death and now wants to sell the Sycamores to a neighbor, one Mr. Duval, as it happens the recipient of all that dirt. After Eloisa takes Marta up to her room, Enrique stays behind to grab a word with Uncle Emilio. Enrique is actually Dr. Enrique and he's not just a traveler looking for a place to stay; Emilio invited him here after the simultaneous sicknesses of his sisters and their equally simultaneous condition changes. Enrique is actually an expert on the occult, specifically vampires and he thinks Emilio's got 'em. So all he's got to do is catch Duval and Eloisa in the act with the help of Emilio and the serving staff, charm and save Marta who he's got to fall in love with and then serve up a bit of stake-shaped justice. In the meantime it's secrets and intrigue for dinner and lies and murder for desert.

It's funny after so many Vampire movies that you can be charmed by a little change of pace or in this case setting. Mexican horror films don't have much of a reputation and in spite of that they went back to basics. Abel Salazar wanted to take one of the most successful horror films of the sound era, Dracula, and bring it to Mexico and not only did he do that, he, writer Ramón Obón and director Fernando Méndez managed to make it resonate with Mexican audiences and they also made a film much more thoroughly satisfying movie. Obón's script doubles down on the complicated plot but Méndez managed to make every character with lines a real person with a personality. One of the people I found myself most concerned about was Anselmo the butler, not because the other characters weren't as interesting but because Méndez managed to make him seem like an unfortunate victim. How often do the serving staff of doomed manors wind up the victims of vampires and other horrid creatures? Anselmo was given the kind of consideration that you'd only find in latter day Hammer films. Then there's the emphasis that Obón puts on family, something only given the faintest attention in Browning's film. And it helps too that everyone is likable, a feet Browning never tried to pull off. Salazar, our hero, is an interesting choice which hints at Mexico's more humane view of stardom. He's the hero of the film and he's a bit paunchy, a little smug and kinda goofy. Good luck finding him outside of a Leo McCarey comedy in the states. And yet I like him more than nearly any male lead in a horror film from that era in the English-speaking world. Celebrity in Mexico was more about crowd-pleasing than superficial definitions of such; how else could they idolize a fat man who wore a mask for most of his adult life? And opposite Salazar? Germán Robles, bridging the gap between Lugosi's foreign charm and Christopher Lee's youthful vigour and charisma. Robles looks a touch like Lee (though he predates him as Dracula) and his cool demeanor never waivers. He's also a touch more charismatic than anyone who'd donned the cape beforehand.

Méndez also proved himself quite an ace at creating mood and atmosphere as well as tension. El Vampiro takes as much if not more time than Dracula setting up the climax but unlike that film it utilizes its quiet moments well. The scene where Marta confirms our suspicion by singing the eerie song she keeps hearing in her bedroom. I'd wondered if it was meant to be something we were both hearing, but when she starts cooing "Go To Sleep...." to Salazar, I realized Mendez was playing with a full deck. The Sycamores makes for a perfectly spooky setting for the conflict and intrigue to play out over. It's an old villa and its owners haven't been quite up to running it lately so the cobwebs that have accumulated and the general mildewy feel of the place feels natural, rather than like a movie set (though that too comes across at times, like in the tunnel connecting Duval to the Gonzalez's house). The smoke outside helps bring the place to life; the Sycamores would become the template for most of ABSA's horror films' settings. There are a few nifty visuals here but my favourite is the teleporting light that Duval uses to get around; not only does it look cool but it establishes that ABSA was playing by different rules. The most obvious sign of their dissent is in the fangs that these vampires wear. El Vampiro was the first film to put in over-sized canines on its vampires and though, again, Hammer made it fashionable ABSA deserves credit for thinking it up first. And that Méndez delivers a film worthy of such innovation is much to his credit. El Vampiro has its weak-spots but there's never a moment where anyone appears to have forgotten where they are. Salazar's facade never drops around Marta and even when trying to comfort her he never plays dumb or too mawkish; the secret is always just behind his smile. And furthermore between the breathless array of poison and loaded questions at dinner and the fist fights, reveals and chases, El Vampiro picks up in a big way to make up for its dull spots. It's a film that feels like the work of people who cared about more than how much they'd gross and that's more than even Hammer can boast for all their professional sheen and Shakespearian artistry.

As it happens I wasn't the only one who loved El Vampiro so whether or not they cared to, ABSA found themselves in a situation where the smartest thing to do was to make a sequel. So like Universal before them and Hammer alongside them, a sequel they did make. Unlike either of those studios, theirs was almost completely different where style was concerned. Mendez found a cinematographer who could really attack the new urban setting and even got to keep his three leads from the last film. Altogether a crisper, more streamlined vision, El Ataúd Del Vampiro or The Vampire's Coffin, is just as thrilling, if perhaps not quite as revelatory, a watch as its predecessor.

The Vampire's Coffin
by Fernando Méndez

In an opening more redolent of a Frankenstein sequel than a Vampire movie, we start with a little graveyard larceny. Dr Enrique (still the affable Abel Salazar) is back doing what he does when he's not out killing vampires, practicing medicine. A colleague of his, Dr. Marion, heard all about his tangling with Count Lavud, and was so impressed with the idea of the vampire that he's dug up the body with the help of a grave-robber. Anyway Enrique is sympathetic to the ambitious Marion's ideas about what he could do by studying the vampire, but he also knows what a stupid idea it is and how catastrophic it would be if Marta were to see his body there. She just happens to be on her to way visit as they stand there talking so Enrique quickly distracts her but frankly she's too caught up in her dancing to notice anything like a coffin in his office. Everything seems perfectly professional until the graverobber comes back and tries to take the pendant from around Lavud's neck. The only problem is that damn cross holding it in place, but he pulls it out no problem. You could write the rest yourself, no? After taking on the graverobber as a slave and stalking the streets for a few days he finds Marta in time for her big performance and Enrique finds him soon after. The conclusion may not be better than the one in El Vampiro, but it's brilliantly filmed and the setting is even cooler.

The first thing to say about The Vampire's Coffin is just how awesome the cinematography is. It's right up there with the likes of The Third Man, M or anything by Billy Wilder. Fernando Méndez was still calling the shots and though El Vampiro was excellently moody it has none of the crisp compositions or brilliant chiaroscuro lighting set-ups so I think credit must be given to new director of photography Víctor Herrera. The scenes that immediately come to mind are the ones in the streets just after Lavud breaks free from the hospital, and then the chase down the huge staircase before the climactic fight in the torture museum, shades of Phantom of the Opera, making this quite the Universal homage. It's worth pointing out that filming in a torture museum was a stroke of genius, but there isn't a dull moment visually in the whole film and the end chase just happens to be the best moment in those terms. You could freeze any moment here, frame it and throw it up at the MFA for my money. The story isn't quite as memorable as the craft it took to make the film but that's ok as it followed on the heels of one of Mexico's greatest horror films. To try and top it would have seemed like megalomania and frankly El Vampiro worked so well because it was really a number of little things that combined to make one solid movie that felt bigger than it was. To be fair I've been on the lookout for an heir to best early vampire movie ever since being soundly disappointed with Tod Browning's inexplicably beloved Dracula, and in that search either of these movies will do, but El Vampiro has enough slightly off about it that works that when you step back you see what a balancing act it must have been. Abel Salazar, nor indeed really anyone, had never produced a horror film and he was taking a risk putting himself in the lead role. The production design probably would have come off looking rather cheap were it not for the amazing work with shadows, fog and cobwebs. And the trick photography is actually really effective. In The Vampire's Coffin I was totally hypnotized by just how beautiful the whole movie looks and so was willing to overlook the few faults that definitely show up before the credits role (Mexicans were no exception to the rule that to make a vampire film, people thought you needed the biggest, cheapest looking rubber bat you could find). There are moments here - one of the main characters confessing their fear of death, the fact that the script references the events of the first film so practically, the excellent use of the vampire's inexplicable cape in shot composition - that make this just as endearing a watch.

Considering how many American vampire films preceded it and that Hammer films were attempting the same trick at almost exactly the same time, both El Vampiro and The Vampire's Coffin make for pretty entertaining treatments of the same well-worn subject. Abel Salazar succeeded in his efforts to bring horror films to Mexico and ABSA would produce several more classics before folding. Indeed they would even continue to breathe new life into the vampire film before all was said and done. While The Horror of Dracula is better remembered and comes off as being effortlessly entertaining where El Vampiro looks like the work of professionals straining to keep up, I have to say that my respect lays more with this little production that could. Bringing horror to new lands is something that I think we should all support. When a country has a means to express itself, especially during times of crisis, it always helps maintaining sanity....even if that means showing people losing theirs.

Could You?

I like to try and keep some sense of order on this site when I can so that I don't just bombard potential followers with one thing after another. I like building up history and importance around certain films because one of my firm beliefs, indeed one of the reasons I started writing in the first place, was because I believe that horror films are one of the best lenses through which to view contemporary society. You could say fiction (especially historical fiction) or diary or documentary (though that's a more recent development) but I do think that horror films are the best way to explore the effects of society on a troubled mind. And what causes those minds to be so troubled is all too often a massively repressive government, a harsh religious conditioning or personal tragedy. So when General Francisco Franco takes over Spain and murders maybe 50,000 people who oppose him ideologically and continues to run the country for some thirty years after this, running rough-shod over human rights and treating the country like one big serving staff, it's bound to make speaking up infrequent. Or if you were a young man growing up in Uruguay in the 50s and 60s and saw the economic downturn yield student and labour protests that led to mass robbery and violence, such a thing would probably have left an indelible stamp on the way you relate to fiction. The former is most definitely what inspired Juan José Plans' novel The Children's Game, released in 1976. Less easy to determine is which of the two dictated Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's decision to adapt the novel into a movie that same year. While I know that Serrador was born in Uruguay, information about his adolescence is scarce. He directed television in Argentina as late as 1962 but by 63 he was in Spain doing the same thing. He moved back and forth between the two countries for much of the late 60s and early 70s so I'm not at all sure I know just what country he was condemning when he adapted Plans' novel but it's a safe bet that he was more than aware of how badly Franco had fucked the Spanish people. And so a man with a few TV horror movies under his belt set about making his second theatrically released film and for nearly six years after the fact he either couldn't or didn't want to make anything. It's not hard to see why. I've seen the movie a few times now and I'm still reeling from it for while it starts harmlessly enough Who Can Kill A Child? is one of the most powerful movies ever made and one of the most terrifying indictments of a government ever committed to film. So maybe it interferes with the order of things around here but this is a movie that means to offend and you can't take your eyes off of it for a second and I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't get a big sign and point you in its direction. But I'll say this, reading this might spoil some of it for you so please, please, please go see it first. My words cannot do justice to the experiencing of seeing this in a dark room.

Who Can Kill A Child?
by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador

After an opening that consists of photos of malnourished and tormented children throughout recent conflicts, we find ourselves on a sunny beach in the Spanish town Benavis where a blonde haired boy of probably five years of age discovers a dead woman floating in the shallows. The ambulance drivers notice that she has four stab wounds in her chest and at least three more on her legs. Just as the ambulance drives away married couple English Tom and very pregnant Evelyn come in on a bus. They're here for an annual festival but also because Tom used to vacation around Benavis as a child. Specifically he remembers visiting the island of Almanzora and he wants desperately to go back. Their trip is ominous from the get go. On TV Thích Quảng Đức is burning himself alive, memories of civil war linger even among the festivities and just after Evelyn gets out of the water everyone on the beach is rushing to the sound of a whistle. Though we know very well what they're all so fascinated by, Tom and Evelyn don't hang around to find out. If they did, maybe they'd think twice about heading to Almanzora. But the next day they rent a small boat and three hours later they've docked. Some kids are hanging out at the dock and they're more than happy to help the couple tie their boat down but then Tom gets too close to one of them. He asks the boy what he's using for bait on the end of his home-made fishing pole and when he tries to look in the boy's basket he closes it so fast Tom almost gets his fingers shut in the lid. The boy simply stares daggers at the interloper until Evelyn calls him away.

The village turns out to be just as quiet as Tom remembers. In fact it's too quiet. There's no one running the ice cream stand and when they try to serve themselves they find it's all melted. There's no one running the local cafe or the supermarket and when they arrive at the only inn in the center of Almanzora they try to make themselves at home but there's no one at work and all the rooms are empty. The only people they do see are children, unless you count the dead body on the floor of the supermarket that Tom walks right past without noticing. Tom and Evelyn catch glimpses of people, like the girl who comes into the cafe where Evelyn sits waiting for Tom to get back. Curiously all she does is touch Evelyn's very pregnant belly and stare at it. Then there's the house with the shutters that close just as Tom walks past. He goes up to investigate and finds nothing, but the second he leaves something very much like the sound of children giggling escapes from the corners of the room. Then there are the phone calls. Someone keeps calling the hotel and then either just breathing heavily or speaking in panicky German. When Evelyn goes out and sees an old man running away down an empty street, the only adult they've seen since arriving on Almanzora, Tom is the one who finally gets it. You see the old man isn't running away from the tourists but from a little girl who beats him over the head with his own cane when she finds him. Tom rushes over and tries to help but to no avail. The most he can do is lay the old man in a stable while he thinks of what it all means but just a few seconds after he walks away, some more kids find the body and...let's just say you won't soon forget what they do to him. The questions are many at this point but only one thing is certain, the odds of Tom & Evelyn surviving with their sanity are slim to none.

That the coat of arms, national anthem and flag that served as national symbols of Spain under Franco's reign are now banned should tell you something about his legacy in Spain; the new government owed it not only to the many dead Spaniards who'd been killed in action or flat out murdered for standing up for a cause its people believed in (and voted for and elected legally) to completely dishonor his memory, but to everyone one else who died for the same reason alongside them. The Spanish Civil War is one of the only times in history that commies and sympathetic parties from literally all over the western world came to the aid of single country. World Wars I and II were about fighting a scourge that ostensibly threatened nations (Anyone who thinks that this was the only reason would perhaps also be interested in a bridge I'm selling. It's all part of my "The Civil War was fought over Slavery because Columbus discovered America" sale) but this was one country trying to maintain its democratically elected government and by association its freedom and sanity. And people, not armies, came from all over Europe to fight Franco's army. Unlike the Nazis the Frente Nacional weren't voted in, they had simply seized control when they lost and then quelled all opposition, then ruled with an iron fist until Franco's death in 75. George Orwell, who wrote the book Homage to Catalonia about the experience, was one of the many foreigners who came to help those loyal to the Popular Front; Richard Nixon lamented Franco's death, calling him an ally and a friend to the United States. That's about as good a summation of the arguments on either side you'll ever need. So while it's possible that Serrador was calling upon his experiences in Argentina or Uruguay, I find it far more likely that he had recent Spanish history in mind when he made his second and final theatrically released movie. I also think he knew exactly what he was doing. Unfortunately Juan Jose Plan's The Children's Game is either out of print or was just never released in English so I don't know whether or not it was just a straight-up horror story or if it really was a kiss-off to Franco but one thing's for sure: Who Can Kill A Child? is easily one of the boldest and most terrifying metaphors/movies ever made.

The central thesis of most of Spanish horror & fantasy (everything from Guillermo Del Toro's childhood trilogy Cronos, The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth to The Others to Shiver to The Orphanage to The Nameless, even the totally bug-eyed Anguish) is that our actions will have catastrophic effects on our children and that, by and large, childhood is stolen from children unfairly. The only other movie I can think of that tackles this thesis with comparable bravery is Victor Erice's gentle-hearted The Spirit of the Beehive which had to skate by on implication because it was released while Franco was still alive. Guillermo Del Toro made the point explicitly by setting The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth during the Spanish Civil War (they work just as well as political texts as Ken Loach's excellent Land & Freedom). But Erice's film was declawed with good reason and Loach and Del Toro had the gift of working some forty years after the General's death. Not that that detracts from the power of their work but I make this point simply to say that Narciso Ibáñez Serrador must have had a professional death wish, if not an actual one by making Who Can Kill A Child? just one year after Franco kicked the bucket! Imagine Pasolini making The 120 Days of Sodom the year after Mussolini was killed and that still doesn't quite put you there. Franco died of natural causes and it was another six years before democrats took over and led Spain into something resembling normalcy. That people can comfortably vacation in Spain today is kind of amazing. People like to theorize a lot about what Germany would have been like if Hitler had won. In Spain, he did, and for years school children were told he'd been sent by God to save the whole country. Serrador (and probably Plans) reasonably got to wondering just what the hell that does to kids. Spain was already one of the most heavily religious countries on the planet, so if they'd already had the fear of god drilled into them, one more name wasn't going to make much difference. But when you convince kids that someone who was STILL ACTIVELY KILLING PEOPLE WHO OPPOSED HIM was not just to be respected but paired with fucking god, you were asking for kids to grow up thinking that murdering dissidents was an order handed down by god almighty and that's pretty much what happens in Who Can Kill A Child? Kids just start killing adults for no reason; the only thing we ever see that resembles a cause is when the boy with the fishing rod simply stares at some kids from another part of the island. Seconds pass and those kids are now part of the fold and they presumably then head inside to kill their own parents. The teachings of a government kept in power by silencing those with the power to do oppose and teaching children (unconsciously, explicitly and implicitly) that the way to adulthood and reason is through torture, murder and death. This is what makes Who Can Kill A Child? not just a horror classic, but one of the most astonishing films of all time. And because this was a genre film he was able to escape the critique that would have accosted a more direct approach to the subject matter, which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that real power lies in horror.

Stripped of its context, Who Can Kill A Child? is still unquestionably one of the most gut-wrenching horror movies of all time and along with The Exorcist, Dawn of the Dead, Shivers, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I Spit On Your Grave, The Devils, The Wicker Man, Alien, Mark of the Devil, Blood on Satan's Claw, Nosferatu The Vampyre, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, Phantasm, Vampire Circus, The Hills Have Eyes, Black Christmas, The Brood, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and maybe a combined strike for Jaws & Duel, represents the vanguard of 70s horror. And of those movies only Alien, The Devils and The Exorcist match or best its intensity; none of these films can compete with its pitch black center and die-hard convictions. It's easy to distance yourself from the events of The Devils thanks to its period setting, Derek Jarman's lavish and baroque set design and Ken Russell's operatic direction. The Brood comes close but ultimately even that has a sunnier outlook. After all that was about a relationship that had festered and died. Who Can Kill A Child? is about an unstoppable force of which a couple is but one casualty. In fact only the flawed films I like to label Cinema Paranoia (The Crazies, Rabid, I Drink Your Blood) come close to matching this movie's bleak thesis and not a one of them is as well made or frightening as this. What Who Can Kill A Child? reminds me most of for it's first forty-five minutes is one of Val Lewton's horror films (though don't go expecting a lot of shadow play, Serrador was more of a realist). Like Cat People or I Walked With A Zombie it's set-up is just a display of lives in transition, people with problems but who have the potential to live happily. Like the Reeds of Cat People, Tom and Evelyn are making a commitment and something outside of their control conspires to bring them apart. Like those films it's early scenes have a kind of lyrical beauty and ease to them; Serrador and Jacques Tourneur were equally adept at depicting married life; It's almost a shame to see them give way to the later tension. And once it establishes not just how normal Tom and Evelyn are but how happy they are (the scene where they shout and kiss in front of the fireworks is hard enough to watch the first time just dreading what's to come. A second viewing makes the scene downright heartbreaking), that's when Serrador strikes. The movie is all unrelieved tension; it's like a rattlesnake, eying you, waiting for the moment when you're closest and then strikes, but not always where you expect it to. The remastered version with the soundtrack revamped makes it clear how much it used loud noises and abrupt, dissonant musical cues to its advantage. Having spent as much time as he had in Television, he'd honed his direction skills and manages to establish a lot using very little. And then of course there are the images he creates.

I've seen a lot of killer child movies but none that have capitalized quite so much on just how terrifying they can be all on their own. The Brood and The Village of the Damned alter the kids' appearance and The Bad Seed dresses its villain up as a caricature but these are just kids who spend most of the movie smiling coyly and relentlessly. Serrador wrings so much fright by just grouping them together as in the scene on the other side of the island or the climax which is one of the few times I actually found myself biting my nails wondering if he was actually going to fucking go there!?! that I was amazed no one had done it before. Seconds before we learn the answer to the above question we get maybe the best still frame in the whole film. But what really gives that scene its power is the end of the previous night. Not only do we get a glimpse of how far Tom is willing to go to protect his family, but we also get Serrador's most troubling and exhausting scene. I'll only say that it's what finally flips a switch in Tom's head. That scene comes after more than an hour of nonstop tension and you get the sense that everyone has had it. Lewis Flander and Prunella Ransome are good throughout; I buy them completely during the early festivities and rooted for them for the whole film but these last scenes are simply flooring. The fear of realization in Evelyn's eyes is one of the most awful things I've seen an actor convey. What makes it worse is that you don't know whether to believe her. You don't find anything half as genuine and truly scary in 99 out of 100 horror movies.

And while it is both a poignant metaphor and a masterfully directed horror film I guess the one thing I forgot to address was the title question. If you found yourself surrounded by murderous children, could you do it? If your life or the life of your loved ones was at stake, could you do it? This is a rare film that asks the same thing of its audience as it does of its characters. I love The Exorcist but in the end what ultimately does it leave up to you? Dawn of the Dead's central thesis lends itself to a question of this sort but it's nowhere near as prescient. None of the other great horror films of the 70s leave you with a question that burns itself into your subconscious in quite the same way. So while it may colour outside the lines every now and again, the dialogue is a touch heavy handed during the first night in Benavis and the editing is a little iffy at times I don't think I can ask much more of this movie....it asks so much of me, of all of us.

Adventure Time!!!!

One of the things I've hoped to accomplish by doing reviews in pairs is not only to make historical/cultural connections between two films or illustrate quickly the relationship between two works but also occasionally to give you patient students ideas about potential double features. Today we look at a genre that I really wish people still did well, the adventure film. These are unconventional to be sure but if you were ever looking to kill an evening with two wholly entertaining and exciting movies and you've exhausted all the good Indiana Jones/Ray Harryhausen movies, look no further. Both work so well because they came in the middle of careers in entertainment so their respective directors were able to play up their greatest strengths and use every lesson they'd learned. Sergio Martino scored what has to be the biggest budget he'd ever had judging by the fantastic widescreen cinematography and production design. Michael Carreras had fought to have a little more creative control over Hammer Films and so when he found himself in the director's chair he didn't let the opportunity to do something different slip. Both films deliver what they promise and then some and even with a bit of lagtime in both they come across as pulpy and spooky when they want to. It's with no little admiration that I say that these are the sorts of films I hope to make someday. Granted, I'd get better fishmen costumes, but...

Island of the Fishmen
by Sergio Martino

Lieutenant Claude De Ross is up a creek without a paddle, and I mean that almost literally. He was the doctor aboard a prison ship that sank and now he's the only one on the lifeboat who isn't between jail cells. Seeing as the year is 1891 and mysteriously failing to report is sort of par for the course whenever you head to sea, Claude gets that he's stuck with these guys and the prisoners also know that if they're ever found Claude's going to turn them in. So when something green and scaly tips the boat over one night and kills one of the prisoners, at least it breaks the tension. The next morning Claude wakes up on a beach and gets to wandering. He finds José, one of the only affable prisoners, in time to stop him drinking sulfur, gaining him his only ally among the remaining prisoners; and he's definitely going to need one. When one of the men, François, wanders off and then gets attacked by something with webbed hands, Claude's perplexed. A tiger trap later and it's just Claude, Peter, the prisoner with the biggest vendetta against the doctor, and José left when they make it to the manse in the center of what turns out to be an island. Right from the get go there's something fishy about this place...yeah, I went there. The place is owned by Edmond Rackham and Amanda Marvin, who look outwardly like a perpetually feuding married couple but when we get a glimpse of their private life we see that it's much more complicated.

Amanda shows an interest in helping Claude which she demonstrates by shooting an attacking snake before he makes it to the house, but she goes out of her way to make sure Rackham doesn't know that she cares about him in the slightest. So when Amanda goes out the night to do something in the waves and both Claude and Peter follow her, the plot thickens. When Amanda goes out into the surf with a jar of something she is greeted by scads of humanoid fish (they look more like amphibians, but in a film like this it pays to shut your brain off) whom she feeds a powdery chemical. On her way back Peter tries to rape her but a quick chase back to the beach puts him in the clutches of the fishmen and the next day Claude and José are the only ones who don't know what's going on. José decides to cut his losses and steals a horse; Claude runs after him but to no avail. What José finds is a cavern with a boat in it all ready to roll but Rackham and his native minions stop him from getting anywhere. So just what the hell is Rackham doing on an island full of fishmen? Why does Amanda stay when she clearly hates her brutal captor? Who's the old man she keeps meeting privately? What's to become of José? And who's to say that once Claude learns the truth it will leave him any better off?

I think it's safe to conclude that Island of the Fishmen was Sergio Martino's last great film. He was a champion of the giallo and produced some of the best regarded movies of the genre (All The Colours of the Dark, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardth, etc.) and then turned his not inconsiderable visual flare to a cycle of adventure films with horrific elements. When the 80s came knocking he tried in vane to make his kind of giallo (the tepid The Scorpion With Two Tails) and, relevancy slipping away from him, he turned to making movies as commercial as could be. But before that he had one last win with Island of the Fishmen. Interestingly when New World Pictures bought the distribution rights they somehow got it into their heads that what the film needed was a new opening. Miller Drake wrote and Roger Corman himself directed this fake out beginning and though it's only six minutes long it makes for just as grim and fascinating a watch as all of Island of the Fishmen. Corman's direction is something I tend to think gets overlooked a lot because the bulk of his career was spent producing one shitty movie after another (with the odd success here and there). Anyway the opening featured a great bit of special effects where the characters (including Mel Ferrer, who, along with Richard Johnson and Joseph Cotton, took the job while waiting to die) were turned inside out by the fishmen. This was then put on the posters and ads and people were so excited by the idea of everyone being turned inside out by fishmen they had to add more of it to the film; all this, I can't help but speculate, was probably what drove Corman to make the much scarier Humanoids From The Deep two years later. This of course was after it had already had two less-than-great theatrical runs. Anyway the final cut that finally made it to DVD doesn't have Corman's added footage, but it does preserve Martino's full length original. That this includes cleaning up the print so that Giancarlo Ferrando's cinematography can be seen in all its lurid beauty is no small triumph.

Coming at the end of his adventure cycle (to be fair I think this was released before The Great Alligator, but Cassinelli and Barbara Bach look older here and the locations are different from the ones used in Mountain of the Cannibal God, so I'm going to assume he shot this one last and just got it to theatres quicker realizing how much better it was than his giant crocodile farce) Island of the Fishmen has all the strengths and few of the weaknesses of his previous efforts. The fishmen themselves are kooky and fun, if not entirely convincing, but the movie has the feel of an old adventure comic or serial so I was willing to let a few things go. The mad science, for instance, is just as mad as you'd expect (in fact we have both the old chestnut of trying to cure world hunger driving one madman, and plain old greed driving the other). There are shades of Dr. Moreau and the giant volcano threatening to level the island reminds me of Mysterious Island, as do the homemade contraptions Rackham uses to explore the island. And to top it off we have the lost continent of Atlantis just below sea level. A dearth of creativity was not one of Martino's problems. Claudio Cassinelli and Barbara Bach are both fun to watch, and Richard Johnson seems to finally be enjoying his role.

All in all these disparate bits of inspired lunacy and excellent craft combine to make a never-dull adventure mystery that shares few of its predecessors' problems. The 70s are loaded with poorly thought out movies of this kind and it's nice to see that some people could learn from their mistakes. Not to use the worst segue in the history of segues but Michael Carreras was a guy who also learned quick and knew what audiences wanted. While the rest of the higher-ups at Hammer Films were content to simply play with the elements that had worked in the past, Michael Carreras, son of studio head James, was constantly looking for new angles. If the bosses had put him in charge sooner, Hammer probably wouldn't have gone under so quickly. Glimpses of Carreras' ingenuity are few if you look just at Hammer's output but they are always revelatory, as well as lurid and exciting. Some people say he invented the Spaghetti Western with Tierra Brutal (or was one of the hands involved in inventing it, anyway), he made one of the strangest and most beautifully shot of the Mummy films, he made the movie with the blowtorch murderer, he made the truly bizarre Prehistoric Women, and was responsible for the downright indecent To The Devil A Daughter, Hammer's last movie before folding. And in the midst of all that he directed one of, if not my all-time favourite, Hammer film The Lost Continent, which was one of the last great moderately budgeted British adventure films. the 70s just didn't deliver this kind of thing (exception: Man Who Would Be King, directed by American John Huston) and then they just stopped making them. This movie has just about everything I could ever ask from a movie like this: cults, sharks, shipwrecks, deadly plants, big puppety crab monsters. There were a lot of weird things in the 70s but nothing that unapologetically presented this kind of thing and let our brains sort it out.

The Lost Continent
by Michael Carreras

After perhaps the greatest film theme song ever written (Not to exaggerate, but "Lost Continent" by The Peddlers is the greatest song ever written. The Peddlers also composed a number of lite organ themes that show up sporadically during the first act) we open on a group of people dressed in everything from 60s mod to Conquistador-esque attire. We focus on one Captain Lansen who watches as the crew pushes a coffin overboard and wonders to himself: How did we all get here? Good question. The start of the story probably goes back thousands of years but we only concern ourselves with the fellows dressed for a cocktail party. They were all passengers of a tramp steamer called the Corita, headed for Caracas. Customs doesn't want them to leave because they rightly suspect that the boat's cargo isn't on the level. And not only is that true but of the five passengers who paid to tag along, all of them has a filthy little secret they're trying to hide. Dr. Webster and his sluttish daughter Unity are running from his potential malpractice suits and the questionable circumstances surrounding her mother, Harry Tyler is a drunk and a conman, Eva Peters is carrying stolen bonds that Ricaldi, a Sammy Davis Jr. wanna-be, has been dispatched to retrieve from her. The cargo that Lansen is so nervous about is Phosphor B or white phosphor. He hopes to sell it and the boat when he docks and so isn't hearing any of it when customs tells him to turn around. He does perk up when he hears that the boat's sprung a leak. Phos B's one weakness is that it explodes when it comes in contact with H2O, so he knows he's got a crisis on his hands. Once the crew puts 2 and 2 together and figures out they're about to be blown sky-high, they commandeer a lifeboat and leave only three engineers and one of the cooks behind in their mad dash off the boat. The first mate tries to reason with the passengers but they paid good money to get to Caracas without anyone knowing about it and they aren't about to head back now. Once the captain gets the idle passengers to get all the canisters of Phos B out of reach of the leak, they have to abandon ship because the engine and the generator won't come back on. Everyone but Patrick the Bartender makes it on the lifeboat.

The lifeboat drifts for at least a few days, during which time Dr. Webster and Tyler get into an argument and wind up in the ocean. Only Tyler makes it back in and Webster is eaten by a shark. After this Tyler swears off the drinking that lead to the argument. The last day of their drifting leads them to a strange part of the Sargasso with red skies and a kind of weed covering most of the surface of the water. The cook wakes up and, delirious, runs right over the edge. In seconds the weed has enshrouded and eaten him. Now everyone is perfectly aware how fucked they are. Luckily hope arrives in the form of Patrick the bartender! He and the Corita didn't sink or blow up after all and beat them into the weeds by a day or so. Any attempts to start her again are foiled when they realize that the weed has wrapped around the boat and the engine and is pulling it further away from the open ocean. The crew has nothing to do now but see where it takes them. Meanwhile Unity is dealing with her father's death exactly like you'd imagine: getting drunk and trying to screw Tyler. When he rebuffs her advances she tries Ricaldi, who's more than willing (and to look at this guy you'd think he's never said 'no' to anything). Their tryst is cut short when a giant plant with a huge glowing eye snakes on board and wraps itself around Unity's waist. Ricaldi saves her by cutting her out with an axe but at the cost of his own life. The list of don'ts is growing by the minute.

The following morning a gorgeous woman called Sarah finds the boat and climbs on, but she's not alone. She's being followed by people dressed in hundred year old garb and most curious of all, everyone's wearing snow shoes and a backpack fitted with balloons. Now the shoes I get, to keep you above the weed when you walk on it. The balloons are a little obvious and no explanation for where they've come from or how they keep filling them is ever fielded. Well, Sarah's got some exposition for us. This place, as you may have already guessed, is frozen in time and has dragged in many a poor traveler, including Sarah and her family who went looking for religious freedom back when you had to sail to get it. But when they arrived here and found themselves under the cruel reign of El Supremo, a boy king who takes orders from a scarred fanatical priest, they were less than thrilled. Sarah escapes the following day to try and find her family (I think) and as Tyler's fallen in love with her, or at least her plunging neckline, he goes after her, Patrick and chief engineer Nick follow behind. They encounter a giant crab-like beast, a large Scorpion (on wheels!!!) before finally being brought to the spanish galleon that serves as El Supremo's headquarters for their sentencing and, once Lansen arrives with a homemade catapult, the final showdown

There's so much to love about The Lost Continent it's tough to know where to start. First of all, any movie that is able to skate by crazed developments like shark attacks, giant crabs, and large quantities of explosives and keep right on rolling because something even fucking crazier is just around the bend, that's the kind of film I want to watch. I think my favourite part of the whole movie, and it works as a metaphor for the whole movie, is when we get our first glimpse inside El Supremo's galleon. In a single excellent tracking shot Carreras shows us all the different costumed survivors and the crazed priest running the show, as well as someone being tortured on the rack. The priest's crackling voice and Klansman's hood make him extra crazy and the scenes that follow drive home just how insane life on the lost continent has become. Later in the scene when we see them feed a failed soldier to the giant mouth in the hole in the floor that was when I fell in love with this film. Carreras was clearly trying to push Hammer films out of the "what's been done before, but different" mould that his dad and Tony Hinds had been pushing since the 50s. That said the film is pretty dated and that probably accounts for its lack of popularity. Why this isn't more loved though is beyond me. I love journey films, I love movies like this that rely on solid performances from reliable repertory players like Michael Ripper, Suzanna Leigh, Nigel Stock, Dana Gillespie, James Cossins and Eric Porter. The photography is moody, the effects are deliciously cheesy, the script is zany, fun and sound, the direction tight, the performances great, the music awesome, I love every 1968 minute of this movie. I won't pretend it's perfect: it drags a bit and I wish I knew a little more about the minor characters but I don't mind so much. I don't even mind so much that it takes almost an hour to get to the titular continent, though I suppose I did the first time around. Now it's all just one sublime puzzle.

So, yes neither film is what you'd call perfect but they have a charming lack of pretense and deliver the goods. And because their so cock-eyed and fun, they go quite well together in their sleazy, zany way. The next time you're looking for something fun to watch and remember that the only thing out is...oh, shit, I don't know, looking out at a marquee now I see The Expendables, Piranha 3D, Eat Pray Love, The Switch, Twilight: Eclipse, and some other shit. Wouldn't you rather see something you can rely on than all of that shit? Not that I'm against new things, Neil Marshall's Centurion is out and it's awesome, for instance, if you can find it, but I like to have stores of dependable schlock in the wings for dry seasons like this one. So by all means, track 'em down, snuggle up to your loved one like a python and enjoy the sight of fishmen tussling with Richard Johnson or of a giant crab fighting a giant scorpion on wheels while men in snow shoes and balloons watch terrified. You'll be glad you did.

The Tragedy of the Splat Pack: Alexandre Aja in America Town

When the MPAA attacked Darren Lynn Bousman for making Saw III too dark, he asked Rob Zombie for advice. His advice was actually fairly brilliant: talk like a filmmaker (something I can more than understand Bousman having trouble with). Explain why the darkness and the violence are needed to tell this story. Now Zombie explaining this to Bousman is like one fratboy telling another to take the high road to score chicks; I should say I think Zombie is far and away the smarter of the two and a much better filmmaker of late, but by that time neither had made anything worth a goddamn. Sure The Devil's Rejects was well made but did anyone care how it ended? Does anyone by this point in time care how Saw II or Saw III effects the events of Saw 3D? No, you wanted to see people get their shit wrecked in putrid green-scale or artfully composed washed out tobacco colored lens filters. Me personally, I didn't and still don't. The best films Zombie's done are only good because of his gift with characterization (or letting actors act) and dreamy imagery but even those have yet to converge in a totally successful fashion. The problem is that Bousman and Zombie are endemic, part of a problem called the Splat Pack by Alan Jones; the nickname has since taken on a new life (Wyrd has already finished a documentary cementing the connection between all the names mentioned in Jones' original article). I want to look at this phenomenon because as any young Frenchmen who picked up a camera in 1960 can attest, a label may be totally misleading or wrong but it gets people talking. It brings legitimacy where there was none. It's not just a bunch of disparate shit, it's a movement, so get on board or fuck off! I find the Splat Pack term misguided because the difference in craft and intelligence from director to director is staggering. I find it especially annoying because it forces geniuses like Greg Mclean on one knee so that fuck-ups like Eli Roth and James Wan can seem taller. Today we're going to look at one of these guys (the group, for those who don't have the spare time I do, is Aja, Wan and sometimes partner Leigh Whannell, Mclean, Zombie, Bousman, Mclean, Roth, and the hit-or-miss Neil Marshall) who's been running on fumes for a few years and who is looking more and more like his dumber peers. Alexandre Aja didn't used to be the kind of director who had to explain himself to censors but his getting mired in a complete misunderstanding of American culture and a reliance on neon-colored sleaziness. But with each successive film, he's become less like the man who made High Tension and more like the guy who has to be told to think like a filmmaker.

Mirrors
by Alexandre Aja

After maybe the most clumsy and gimmicky opening in film history, we meet Ben Carson. Carson is a cop who shot someone in the line of duty and turned to drink instead of the love of his family. Everyone but his sister Amy has abandoned him now and he's forced to take low-wage security work to stay afloat. His assignment is to guard the Mayflower, a department store that burned down. Carson takes it but the more he learns about the guy he replaced, the less he can tell fantasy and reality apart. THe problems he faces have to do with the giant mirrors all over the store. Thanks to a helpful and gruesome prologue we know that the mirrors can compel people to kill themselves, or more accurately, their mirror images do the job for them. So what does this mean for Ben? Well, if he fails to do what the mirrors want him to, it could be bad news for his family. After spending a few traumatic nights watching the mirrors play tricks on him, they take their first casualty, Amy. Her reflection stays behind at the mirror one night and pulls her jaw off and Ben's the only guy the police suspect who could have done it. Yet, suspicion immediately falls off of him in what is the first of many gigantic logical loopholes in the film's real-world plot. Anyway, right after the mirrors kill his sister, they scratch a name on the glass for Carson to find: Esseker

So Ben uses his insanely helpful connections at the NYPD, including his estranged coroner wife Amy, to start digging. He unearths a conspiracy going back several years to when the Mayflower was a psychiatric hospital (like they'd put one of those in the heart of fucking manhattan). One patient, Anna Esseker was a particular problem. Her family got tired of dealing with what they assumed was demonic possession and dumped her off at the hospital where one Dr. Kane ran the show. Kane's patients all killed themselves one night and Esseker disappeared, believed dead by the authorities, but this is a conspiracy heavy horror movie isn't it? So, she's still alive someplace, and that place....Pennsylvania!!!! Before he can go to that godforsaken shithole and look for her, he has his family to deal with. More than once Ben's gone home while Amy wasn't home and incurred her wrath upon finding him there. The last straw is when he comes home and starts painting over every reflective surface in the house and then as if to clear himself of his insanity charge, fires three rounds into a mirror in the middle of their suburban street. After that makes him frustrated he runs off in search of Anna Esseker's childhood home. But before he gets far though some shit happens that makes Amy believe all of Ben's bullshit about magic mirrors. So after he finishes painting all the mirrors he takes off to find Anna Esseker and make her fess up before the rest of his family falls prey to invisible ghouls.

Alexandre Aja has a strange relationship with America. The Hills Have Eyes was a kind of warts-and-all depiction of American politics that misread its history amusingly, though after years and years of movies like Eurotrip I'd say we've earned a little finger-pointing. I liked The Hills Have Eyes because it's claustrophobic and brutish and has just the right amount of gore and its misanthropy was mostly inherited. Aja's style was nothing revolutionary but it sure made everything look nicer. But that was easy: he was working from a template introduced by one of the strangest and most loved American independent horror films of the last fifty years. What happens when it's just him and an unknown korean film with a PG rating? Mirrors ain't much of a remake and unsurprisingly ain't much of a stand-alone movie either. The mythos in the original Mirrors wasn't exactly mathematically sound but next to the drunken ramblings this film calls a screenplay it's like something by Raymond Chandler. The hauntings have no continuity and do whatever's most convenient for Aja; whenever he needs a scare, he invents something that the mirrors are capable of. By the end of the movie the rules have changed completely and we're looking at a half-dozen recently introduced special effects that wind up seeming desperate rather than clever. Who still thinks that guys behind cloth thing from Nightmare on Elm Street is scary in any other context? Anyone? The mirrors are also alternately able to control reflections, make objects move, possess people, cause hallucinations and send messages. So why not use those things in a more sensible way? If the whole point of their murder spree was to find Anna Esseker, why not possess a police officer with access to her case file right away? Because clearly they aren't limited to just the mirrors at the Mayflower. Why not scour every mirror in the world until they find her? And if picture frames or puddles count as mirrors, why not use that to their advantage and just let everyone know that they want Anna Esseker until the masses are forced to find her. They can fucking kill whoever they want so why play by any rules at all?

But Aja and Grégory Levasseur's script's biggest problem isn't the killer surface at the film's core but Ben Carson. Neglecting that Keifer Sutherland's screaming bouts don't exactly make him a believable father, lover or husband and forgetting cliches that rule his personal life (his first visit home is like a checklist of dysfunctional movie marriages, only slightly less stupid than the same scenes in The Haunting In Connecticut) there's still the problem that Carson has no redeeming qualities yet everyone he knows practically climbs over each other trying to help him. His wife can't decide whether she thinks he's dangerous or insane or both yet lets him look at a corpse she's just finished examining (in point of fact Amy does not one logical thing the whole movie; she's the kind of person who sports a cleavage-revealing white T-shirt when her children are under attack so that when it gets wet the teenaged boys in the audience will care what's happening). His friend, detective Larry Byrne (a wasted Jason Flemyng), gives him every file within reach that has anything to do with the cases he's curious about regardless of paper work or the ethics of giving a murder suspect evidence. Finally where the fuck are the cops when Carson shoots up the mirrors on his front lawn? Or kidnaps a nun at gunpoint? This kind of total naivete is almost charming (indeed it's a fucking hoot at times) but comes across mostly as the point of view of someone who's never lived in New York City, read about it, watched a cop show in his life, or been outside before. Aja's American films can almost be seen as the reverse of what Eli Roth did for all of Europe in his Hostel films, except Roth didn't take money from any of the countries he summarily dismissed. Aja doesn't know anything about America but neither does Roth know anything about Europe. Which is maybe why Aja and Levasseur view Pennsylvania as some kind of tiny backwoods hamlet populated by sunburnt yokels who can barely talk and a secret order of nuns (oh and nuns don't live in monasteries, they live in nunneries, it's right there in the name, Alex). Also, I don't know what the fuck part of Pennsylvania Ben Carson goes to visit but I'm gonna put money on it not housing both superstitious hillbillies and an order of nuns living in pristine facilities with manicured lawns. Having made the journey from PA to NY a hundred and twelve times I'm something of an expert and though there are most assuredly hillbillies they aren't the nearly feral creatures shown here. In fact I'd like to point out that is Ben Carson had kept driving another hour or so, he'd have wound up in North Philadelphia which is if anything more dangerous than wherever his beat would have been. Mirrors' sheltered geographical judgment is almost as egregious as M. Night Shyamalan's depiction of Bucks County in Signs. Have filmmakers ever bothered leaving Philadelphia? Until you feel like driving a few hours why don't you go looking for inbred psychopaths someplace else.

And finally, and this is really the smallest of my complaints because by the time it comes up we've already seen Carson battle a gymnastic, possessed nun and his family undergo Mouse Hunt-style hauntings from the mirror demons, logic be damned. Anyway, my issue is with the conclusion of the film, so if you don't want it ruined I guess you can just skip down to where my Piranha review starts and come back after you've had a good chuckle. Ok, so if Ben Carson is dead or just lost in the mirror world, how can he see all that he does? If the point of being on the other side is that you only communicate through mirrors, shouldn't you only be allowed to show up in things reflected? Yet he walks around basements with no light to reflect him in any surface. It may be a minor quibble considering how gleefully stupid Mirrors gets, but seriously, get your story straight. Mirrors is fun in spite of itself and is decently put together, when it's not being misanthropic and vile for the sake of it but it's only as fun watching a big angry guy thrash around a kitchen with a blindfold on; eventually he runs out of stuff to break and things get tedious. And this from the guy who made this decade's Daughters of Darkness. But Aja wasn't nearly done making audiences forget he made High Tension. OH-HO NO! He had one more ace up his sleeve that was going to make you forget he wasn't a VHS-loving American teenage boy instead of a once-promising French art-house/horror maestro. He'd need the sideburns of Eli Roth to do it but damned if he didn't pull it off.

Piranha 3D
by Alexandre Aja

Matthew Boyd is out fishing on Lake Victoria, the spot his Arizona hometown is named after, when a seismic disturbance opens a hole in the lakebed. The hole leads to an underground lake where prehistoric piranhas have been living off of each other for two thousand years. Boyd's boat is caught in a whirlpool and he's thrown into the drink where the very hungry fish find and skin him alive. Boyd is incidentally played by Richard Dreyfuss, the closest this movie was going to come to prestige, so it's fitting that the first thing we see is the movie's only link to Jaws (and class) eaten in the first five minutes. It's a good way to let you know that what's going to follow is some of the trashiest shit you've ever laid eyes on. As anyone could have told you before you knew anything other than that this was a movie about killer sea-dwelling anything, it's spring break and the town needs money from visiting dipshits to stay afloat (ahem). So when Sheriff Julie Forester finds Boyd's body (...get it...?) and decides it's time to think about closing the lake...well, if this film followed through on its sleaziness and gave us an evil capitalist, I'm sure they'd object, but the closest we get is Derrick Jones, the proprietor of Wild Wild Girls, a reality porn site. I guess you could count Eli Roth as the shit-eating DJ at the wet T-Shirt contest but he's only around for five minutes. Anyway Jones recruits local teen (and sheriff's son) Jake Forester to help show him around the lake so he can find spots to film his naked models. Except of course that means leaving his kid brother and sister home alone and accidentally bringing his high school crush Kelly Driscoll on the boat with him. And as if you didn't care enough about these assholes, there's also a sick attempt to force the weirdness of Jones hitting on the underage Kelly and the two naked women hitting on Jake into the service of the romantic subplot. It's enough to make you vomit. IN 3D!!!

Back on the Jaws front some divers come in to see about the big rift opening up below the lake and find the evidence needed to support their underwater lake theory. This also gets two of three of them chewed alive when lead diver Novak Radzinsky surfaces with one of their bodies, he brings one of the prehistoric monster fish with him so he and the sheriff have something to show the guy who runs the petshop, played by a never-hammier Christopher Lloyd (and by christ is that saying something!). He tells them that this species of fish hasn't been seen in two thousand years, yadda-yadda-yadda, better close the goddamned lake! But wouldn't you know it, the kids just want to have a splashy good time, man! Fuck your conformist not-getting-eaten-by-big-fish bullshit! And then once every Jersey Shore reject has had their face pulled off, we head over to climax bay where every minor character in the film is in danger of being eaten by still more fish! The sheriff better hurry before more than just the skanks and coke-fiends get chewed up.

The big problem with making Piranha a no-holds-barred, trashy, gory fuck-a-thon is that fish aren't sexy like serial killers are, nor are they scary like sharks or alligators. They have nothing of people in them, they're almost like insects, so a lot of patience is required to find them anything other than irksome; the unending chomping sounds don't help. Look at the poster at the bottom of the page. See how frightening that image is, and how spooky and hopeless it looks. I'd have liked some of that to show through in the movie. The poster should not be scarier than the movie! So while yes it's technically pretty nasty when the fish tear into a bunch of dumb twenty-somethings, Aja's film has in no way earned the massacre and you can't sympathize with either the killer fish or the dumbasses who get their asses bitten off. Wet T-Shirt contests and Girls Gone Wild aren't incitement enough to kill people and being stupid can't be a victim's sole karmic crime anymore. Every third person in the world is as dumb as the people on Lake Victoria; that's not special. In order for us to enjoy their being torn limb from limb by piranhas and in some cases each other, they needed to have spent the movie killing orphans or burning down abortion clinics. Aja simply thinks that being an American coed is crime enough that you need to be punished. Don't get me wrong I hate everyone in this movie (except Ving Rhames and Adam Scott) but that isn't enough anymore. Piranha winds up acting like its big-breasted shot-fillers, a lot of bright colors and every reason to watch even when you know you're going straight to hell for doing so. But like a woman with fake breasts or Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino, there's nothing behind Piranha's inexplicably orange skintone. The film has nothing to offer but tits and gore and it only gets around to being fun and campy in several second bursts. This is especially aggravating when you look at what it's aping. The original Piranha was scary, smart and funny. Piranha 3D is more a Jaws clone than a remake of its namesake and is neither smart, funny nor scary. It is nasty from end to end and as much as Adam Scott believes in it, even he was phoning it in during the last half-hour (and for those of you who haven't seen it, that's when everyone gets cut to pieces). Piranha is all shameless nudity that tries and fails to have its cake and eat it too, punctuated by misanthropic set pieces. It's a film with a moral compass that after an hour of nude swimming and human margaritas doesn't mean anything. In other words this was not the kind of movie Alexandre Aja should have made; he doesn't get American movie cliches and he doesn't have a sense of humour to speak of.

The difference between Mirrors and Piranha 3D is that my girlfriend and I can safely watch Mirrors and have two hours of fun at its expense. I don't want her, or anyone else for that matter, to see Piranha 3D. It's too nasty to be fun and I don't want to show her some poor girls' face being pulled off at the hair because that's fucking horrible. And if a film with what Nathan Rabin calls Underwater Skank Ballet can't make me set aside my reservations and simply enjoy its stupidity, then someone's done fucked up. Aja's style is long gone, dulled by blinding colors, Greg Nicotero's gore effects and topless women; Piranha could have been made by anyone. In fact if someone dumber and meaner had been put in charge it might have overcome its dull first hour, forgotten its inane plot trappings and just been the trashy, orphan-kicking masterpiece it could have been. If Eli Roth or Darren Lynn Bousman had been in charge, I could have gotten into how badly everyone deserved to die, including the directors! Instead I spent the whole movie thinking that this couldn't have been the guy who made High Tension. When we were walking out my Dad made an excellent point, which is that there's no way in hell Aja would have made this movie in France. Which really brings us to the whole problem of the Splat Pack. Now that gore movies in the Eli Roth mold have become not just a sustainable industry but a self-sustaining genre, Aja doesn't need to do anything to win his audience anymore. Whether or not we like it (and I sure as shit don't) we as a culture have said yes to six fucking Saw movies, two Hostel movies, and remakes of every also-ran slasher movie of the early 80s (blessedly they've left Humongous alone, for now). So that means Aja, who was at one time going to be something, can hand in a shitty 3D movie that smells like beer and sex and no one's going to bat an eye. In fact, its mediocre box office performance has already got him talking about a sequel. Yeah, cause there were so many unanswered questions. And because they've got that label attached to them, Eli Roth and probably Aja now believe they're doing something culturally important. They're not. They're making films whose message is, in all seriousness, don't leave the safety of the place where you masturbate and don't even think about sleeping with anyone more worldly than you.

I won't lie and say I didn't enjoy some of Piranha 3D but it's part of a larger problem that really bugs me and it's such a colossal waste of talent that all I can feel now is anger. Aja had the increasingly rare Elisabeth Shue, Adam Scott and Ving Fucking Rhames and not one of them gets a memorable scene or line of dialogue. Rhames has only three scenes in the whole movie, which is a crime unto itself. He should have been the hero of a film like this and he should have that boat motor from the get go. I still liked this better than Dead Alive, another idiotic gore movie, but ultimately Piranha is too dumb and lazy for its own good. The fish effects are terrible and Aja seemed to know it, but that doesn't stop them from stopping the movie in its tracks so I can wonder why the shit they didn't do a better job. The 3D is distractingly awful, like the worst I've ever seen, worse than that corpse-raping Michael Jackson tribute at the Grammys. Whenever there's a perspective shot, it's like someone's holding up two different pieces of construction paper to illustrate depth. 3D glasses always give me a headache, but usually they earn it with their more or less seamless incorporation. Coraline, for instance, went way out of its way to earn its third dimension. The 3D in this, like the plot, felt mostly obligatory and worsened my headache. The 3D is actually kind of symptomatic of the direction: they couldn't be bothered to do this one stupid gimmicky thing right (indeed the only thing the filmmakers seemed committed to was the climactic orgy of dismemberment at the wet T-Shirt contest) then they sure as hell weren't going to stop to check the script for cliches or whether they had a single sympathetic character left by the time the credits roll. They couldn't even get right what they were supposed to get wrong. If you're going to be shameless, then really go for broke. I want to see cops one day away from retirement, I want to worry about whether the dog will survive, I want a family pulled apart by devotion to duty that can only be saved in the climax, I want to smile audibly whenever someone grabs a shotgun or a boat engine because a holy ass-whooping is about to go down, I want the filmmakers to have a sense of humour that extends beyond severed dick jokes™. I want more than the bare minimum of extremes, if that makes sense, I want to be aware that the director and I are on exactly the same page and he isn't just cutting up porn stars for the sake of it. Alexandre Aja, you're boring. Good day, sir. I SAID GOOD DAY!

"Where were you last night....?"

Vampires have never really been America's thing. The best ones are made by Europeans and Mexicans and Asian counties make a decent effort as well. Not that anyone asked but I'd kill to see an East African vampire movie or maybe one from Thailand or Malaysia or thereabouts. I swear I get tired of the same old same old. Not that today's vampire films don't have new things to offer, they do, but the real issue is the ending. If you're watching a revisionist vampire movie (one with more in common with The Wolfman than most) you know the ending, and if you're watching one in the Dracula mold, you know the ending. There is just no predicting how Thirst or Alucarda are going to end; The Vampire and The Return of Dracula are less well-endowed in the mystery department. They do skate by on inventiveness of script in the former case and accomplished filmmaking in the latter, but they could have used some of the fervor and mood of their Mexican counterparts; Paul Landres was a fine director but not quite the visionary these films needed to outdo the likes of Hammer Studios, who would take all the credit for the vampire boom in 1958. The Horror of Dracula would make shadow dwellers of Landres' two films but considering there hadn't been a major American vampire film (worth watching) in ten years they could have been lazy and terrible.

The Vampire
by Paul Landres

In a fascinatingly unflinching opening credits sequence a boy on a bike brings a box to one Dr. Matthew Campbell. In the box, a small animal. The camera never breaks its gaze from the boy as completely overwrought Gerald Fried music blasts and honks like there's no tomorrow. If for no other reason, The Vampire is worth watching than this laughably incongruous intro. Anyway Campbell is a certified quack and is dying from whatever mad venture he'd gotten into in his basement laboratory. The boy fetches neighborhood physician Paul Beecher who arrives just in time to hear the dying man's last request: to know the time. It's a head scratcher and all Beecher can determine is that what killed Campbell is heart failure and he tells the sheriff, Buck Donnelly, when he shows up a while later. Beecher confiscates the pills from the dead doctor and heads home. Aside from his chipper daughter, hot new assistant, and latest patient, the other thing waiting for him at home is a headache. He asks Betsy to fetch him his pills, but wouldn't you know it, she accidentally slips him the ones Campbell died with. Yeah, that's not good.

Well tomorrow brings a whole new headache for Beecher to contend with. Yesterday's patient, Marion Wilkins is much worse than she was yesterday and when she gets an eyeful of the doctor she shrieks and cries, begging for him to get away and then her weak heart kills her. Beecher's naturally distraught, especially because he can't shake the feeling that he did more than indirectly cause his patients' massive coronary, maybe something to do with the two bite marks on Marion's neck. Donnelly picks at that scab by telling the doctor about the reports he got about a prowler in the neighborhood last night. Add to that Beecher's having blacked out and not remembering anything and you've got reasonable suspicion that he's been very naughty. Backup arrives in the form of Dr. Will Beaumont and his assistant Henry. These two work for the university that paid for Campbell's research and want to pick up the pieces in the hopes that they'll figure out what it is that brought on his early demise. Campbell was making some kind of control serum out of the blood of vampire bats. What worries Beecher is that Henry and Will figure out that all the animals Campbell tested died from something called capillary disintegration. So, won't he just maybe suffer from the same thing unless he takes more of Campbell's pills? And won't he maybe cause another vampire-bite heart attack if he does so?

Commentators have noted that The Vampire is probably a reply to The Werewolf, a very fifties take on the werewolf movie with a scientific explanation for the lycanthrope of the title. So I guess it makes sense that the movie's central performance (easily the best in the film) owes so much to Lon Chaney Jr.'s turn as Larry Talbot in The Wolfman. John Beal puts on a mopey face when he's human and a very wolfy face when he's a vampire. The make-up doesn't work half as well as Beal's performance, which is the highlight of the movie. He manages real moments of pathos when at his lowest moments, though he occasionally verges on whiny, and his is a fresh take on cinematic vampires. Beecher has nothing of the usual grace of Dracula and his ilk; he's just an animal, an important step in the evolution of the vampire in movies. There are a few other things to recommend it, mannered direction and a pretty bitchin' skeleton effect among them, but mostly its Beal that makes The Vampire worth watching.

I wasn't bowled over by The Vampire but I wasn't alone in being pleasantly entertained by it. The next year saw Landres heading the same team to make a second vampire movie, much more in line with the likes of Hammer Studios and Cinematográfica ABSA's updates. This movie saw a vampire, actually answering to the name Dracula, literally coming out of Transylvania and infecting small town America. Doesn't come more obvious than that does it? That The Return of Dracula opened against The Horror of Dracula, the film that saved Universal studios from bankruptcy, probably ensured its obscurity but relatively speaking the two movies are just about equal in measure. If anything Return is the more tasteful of the two movies, which maybe explains why it didn't save anyone's career. If audiences went ballistic for a new colourized Dracula replete with heaving corsets and bloody fangs, what chance did a subdued suburban take on the same story have of winning a following? The 60s were nearly upon us, people wanted gore and sex, damnit! The Return of Dracula had an engrossing and almost sweetly sentimental yarn about life turned upside down, not the violent, Technicolor peep show people wanted.

The Return of Dracula
by Paul Landres

In Transylvania, a group of government officials and a priest arrive at a cemetery with torches, hammers and stakes. The grave they're after turns out to be empty when they get to it, which is bad news for Bellack Gordal. Gordal is a painter leaving for the US to visit his last remaining relatives having grown tired of living under in poverty under a regime he doesn't agree with. He settles into his train car but fails to notice his roommate, a man with a hat covering his face who may or may not have just escaped from a torch-bearing mob. When the train leaves the station, the man in the hat gets the better of the fatigued artist and he never arrives at his destination...but someone answering to the name Bellack Gordal sure does. A few weeks later when the last train pulls into Carleton, CA the Mayberry family is waiting for Gordal and you and I aren't there to fill them in when he shows up mysteriously after all the passengers have cleared off. Cora, the widowed mother of the family, hasn't seen her cousin Bellack since he was three years old, so she could be welcoming Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee for all she knows. The kids, young Mickey and late-teenaged Rachel, have never laid eyes on the man and so everyone welcomes him with open arms. Lucky for Count Dracula they're also completely unfamiliar with the habits of an artist so it seems like charming eccentricity when their foreign cousin sleeps all day behind a locked door, rarely eats and refuses to meet the local reverend. Once the count has put his vice-like grip on Jenny Blake, a blind girl who Rachel looks after, he starts thinking longterm. Aside from the distrust of Tim Hansen, the local boy who Rachel's probably been kissing in secret since they were kids, the only hope of stopping the fake artist from making Carleton the next Transylvania is John Meierman, the leader of the mob from the start of the film. He's followed up on every passenger who rode with the real Gordal ever since they found his body discarded on the train tracks just outside Hungary. After spending a few minutes in fake Gordal's presence, his agent has reasonable doubt. And once that agent doesn't make it out of town, Meierman knows he has his man.

The Return of Dracula most endearing feature is the way it basically amps up all the little details from The Vampire. The Vampire made a lot out of its suburban setting but the conflict was nothing new. The Return of Dracula is all about the comings and goings of the Mayberry family (coincidentally, Mayberry is also the name of the town Andy Griffith used to police, which is not a bad frame of reference for Carleton). The members of the club the reverend oversees that throw the Halloween party that Gordal wants to avoid, all seem like real people. Cora, Mickey and Rachel are all stock and average enough characters but there are moments where they seem like people you know. My favourite of these is when Tim, who's feeling a little miffed about all the time Rachel spends talking about and hanging around Bellack. A too-serious remark leads Tim to quip "That's not what you said last night." At which point Norma Eberhardt drops her actorly manner and with a little fatigue and an understanding of her needless melodrama, says "Oh shut up." It's a great, genuine moment and its almost touching, showing you in a second that these two have a long history behind them and a good one ahead of them, too. The Vampire felt breathless but Landres lets his characters breathe a little here so moments like that have a chance to rise to the surface. Similarly between the excellent print I watched and Landres concentration, The Return of Dracula feels like the more artistic film, even if a side-by-side comparison might prove otherwise. Granted it's not Nosferatu or anything but it's always nice to find a B movie that's even a little visually rewarding. I was reminded frequently of Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross, though even that's pushing it; Landres was no Siodmak. Gerald Fried gets a great cue during the opening credits but once again his music is a touch too-huge and Bernard Herrmann-esque to be taken seriously.

Neither The Vampire nor The Return of Dracula was strong enough to take credit for the vampire revival but they were solid movies. They wouldn't have kicked off anything (indeed they were already riding someone else's wave) but without Hammer's massive shadow blocking out their importance it's impossible to tell whether they'd have grown more popular. It's also impossible to deny that vampires were something both filmmakers and audiences wanted to embrace and revisit. It can't be a coincidence that three countries decided to tell the Dracula story their way at exactly the same time and that each found something new to say. Though it was probably The Horror of Dracula that caused Landres to put a grizzly full-colour heart staking in the middle of his black and white vampire movie, he had so many novel ideas that it is kind of a shame that his films weren't the successes they needed to be.