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RIP: Carolyn Zeifman Cronenberg (1950-2017)

July 5, 2017, 1:32 pm
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David Cronenberg's wife Carolyn Zeifman has died at the age of 66, due to an undisclosed illness. She was a production assistant on RABID and contributed to the editing of both RABID and FAST COMPANY before giving birth to their son Brandon, who has since become a filmmaker. In 2006, she returned to filmmaking with two documentaries pertaining to the production and promotion of her husband's film A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE: ACTS OF VIOLENCE and TOO COMMERCIAL FOR CANNES.

This sad news brings back a rush of personal memories. Back in the day, when I was covering the production of David Cronenberg's 1980s films, he invited me into his home on a few occasions - for interviews, for lunch, for dinner. Carolyn was always a warm, attentive and gracious hostess; attractive, easy-going, very much a homemaker. She told me she had "always known David," even before his first marriage (if I remember correctly, he and her brother had been friends at school). I remember once showing up to do an interview there, and without me saying a word, she intuited that I wasn't feeling well, got something for my stomach, invited me to stretch out on the couch and told David to wait till I felt better. She also liked to poke fun at how he and I found conversation difficult outside an interview context. David once told me that Carolyn was "a natural editor," that he could show her a scene and she would know instinctively when to cut and where to cut to. Of course, the grounding that she, their family and home provided made his finest work possible. What I knew of her was only good, but having known him somewhat better, I suspect she was a more extraordinary woman than most people knew.

My deepest sympathies to David, their family, and loved ones.

(c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
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Fresh As Ever: MARRIED TO THE MOB

July 7, 2017, 9:37 am
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Not sure how or why I missed it all these years, but finally caught up with Jonathan Demme's MARRIED TO THE MOB (1988) last night and loved it. I tend to think of the 1980s as a period of uncomfortable transitions, for both the cinema and fashion in general, but everything about this film remains light, tight and refreshing. It has a comic/romantic verve to it that reminded me a lot of Preston Sturges, but it was less to do with the writing than the cast - all bright, all attractive, all inspired,and touched by an ethnic diversity that feels happy and genuine rather than forced as it so often does today. It also does something with its end titles I've never seen done elsewhere; it tells the film's story a second time, chronologically, using only outtakes - glimpses of a dozen or more scenes we didn't see, yet we instinctively know where they would have fit; it seems to fill in the lives of all the characters, lending further color and dimension to everyone and thus making the whole confection seem doubly real.

Seeing the film now is also a sobering reminder of how much can change in 30 short years. All the principals (including Alec Baldwin and Oliver Platt) look like kids; Michelle Pfeiffer and a remarkably athletic Matthew Modine (neither of them seen much anymore) were never better; Dean Stockwell (now 80-something) is 50-something and still looking flashy and virile; Mercedes Ruehl (who won the New York Film Critics Award for her performance as the insanely jealous wife, but would now rate a "Who?" from one or two generations further on) burns up the screen; and Demme (now dead) comes across as the most alive young director on the block.

A movie that is not only good to see, but which seems genuinely happy to see you in return. Warmly recommended - on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber.

2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
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RIP Elsa Martinelli, Queen of Continental Op

July 8, 2017, 12:36 pm
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If you don't know what I mean by "Continental Op," it's time to learn - which you can do by reading my article on this genre of films in VIDEO WATCHDOG 168, which is still available in print from our back issue department, as well as digitally.  

To see and hear Elsa performing her song "Bandit," click here.
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Review: THE HAPPY ENDING (1969)

July 14, 2017, 11:39 am
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John Forsythe and Jean Simmons in Richard Brooks' THE HAPPY ENDING.

I'd never heard of the film before, but I was sufficiently intrigued by the pedigree of THE HAPPY ENDING (1969) to watch: Jean Simmons, written and directed by Richard Brooks (her second husband, made directly after his astonishing IN COLD BLOOD), photographed by Conrad Hall (following his work on IN COLD BLOOD and COOL HAND LUKE), music by Michel Legrand (which at times apes Quincy Jones' jazz cues for ICB though it also yielded the MOR hit "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?"), Shirley Jones (amazing and sexy - she had won an Oscar for her work in Brooks' ELMER GANTRY), John Forsythe (again ICB), Teresa Wright, Robert (Bobby) Darin, Dick Shawn, Lloyd Bridges, Tina Louise. 

It's packaged as the story of a violent divorce (anniversary cake in the trash), but it's more the story of a happily married woman's crises of identity and middle age - how she needs to break out of her routine to look forward to new beginnings rather than continue drinking away the years separating her from old age and death. While there is some cheesiness about its greeting card depictions of middle-class contentment and the need to escape it, the film's audacious, time-shifting construction shows that PERFORMANCE was hardly an isolated case even in 1969; even by today's standards, this stands out as an admirable piece of writing and construction, well worth seeing by those who don't mind movies that end not with answers but (rather like Ken Russell's WOMEN IN LOVE, made the same year) with a pointed question. It also opens with some of the most ravishing color photography of New York City that you'll ever see, and is generally a demonstration reel for Conrad Hall's evolving genius.

There is a handsome Blu-ray disc available from Twilight Time, with excellent liner notes by Julie Kirgo that offer helpful background information and perspective on this unfairly overlooked production.

(c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
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RIP George A. Romero (1940-2017)

July 16, 2017, 4:51 pm
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Romero on the set of DAY OF THE DEAD, 1985.
Today, the life of writer-director George A. (for Andrew) Romero was claimed by his own most abiding subject - death - at the age of 77. The cause was lung cancer, reminding me that, even on the set of TWO EVIL EYES, almost 30 years ago, he could be seen playing with a yo-yo in an effort to wean himself away from cigarettes, that tempting companion of so many artists who sit alone in rooms, turning their insides out for our entertainment - and if they just work a little harder, perhaps our illumination.

Filming Judith O'Dea in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.
Romero changed everything in the horror genre. He first arrived on the scene in 1968, arguably the most revolutionary year in living memory, with what could be considered the first horror film worthy of the adjective "confrontational." Like all the best horror films, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD started small and spread across the country, and then around the world, like an urban legend; and unlike most films of its kind at that time, it appeared to have been deliberately constructed to mean what it was saying (which was about zombies, then a very underused form of monster) and what it was not saying (about our country, about race, about Vietnam, about the gulf between the media and the man on the street). But it was more than the beginning of a politicized horror cinema; its success became the starting pistol for the independent film movement in general. It was not an overnight thing, and it certainly didn't benefit Romero himself in any ready or significant way. I remember that NIGHT was still gaining speed within the horror community even as he was making other kinds of horror film like THE CRAZIES and MARTIN. Thanks to some enthusiastic reviews and its happy coincidence with the rise of the Midnight Movie phenomenon, MARTIN (1978; one of the few films to treat vampirism as a psychosexual kink, as in Simon Raven's novel DOCTORS WEAR SCARLET and Theodore Sturgeon's SOME OF YOUR BLOOD) received the widest release Romero had enjoyed since NIGHT, and it was around the time that NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD started showing up on television that DAWN OF THE DEAD was announced. DAWN (1978) changed everything too - paving the way for blockbuster horror sequels and the unrated horror years. Without DAWN OF THE DEAD and Tom Savini's colorful splatter effects, Italian horror got a new lease on life extending it by more than a further decade. Unfortunately, Mario Bava died before he could benefit but - thanks to Romero and DAWN - Lucio Fulci continued working for the rest of his life.

John Amplas in MARTIN.
For a golden few years, there in the first half of the decade when home video boosted his celebrity, Romero seemed to be having his cake and eating it too. KNIGHTRIDERS (1981) in particular, made well in advance of "Ren-fests" becoming a thing, showed that Romero could deliver a disarming, moving, multi-tiered story outside the horror genre; it's a film that speaks beautifully to its disenfranchised, post-Woodstock generation while also celebrating the creative, mobile lifestyle that Romero worked to pursue. It's a film that he looked back on, with MARTIN, as his best. He might have made more films in its vein, but the success of DAWN - unprecedented for an unrated film, and thus embodying a defiance of one of the most fundamental rules of commercial filmmaking - required that he specialize in horror, and preferably zombies. He contained multitudes, but he wanted to work, so - after joining forces with Stephen King for the hoot that is CREEPSHOW (1982) - he set about giving the fans what they wanted with DAY OF THE DEAD. He wrote it under the influence of Stephen King's THE STAND, as a vast apocalyptic saga that he intended to be his untoppable, final word on the subject. The anticipation for the project in the fan press was well into the red, but - for reasons that defy common sense - he couldn't find the funding to realize his vision, partly because his vision included working in the filmmaking community he was developing in Pittsburgh and having total creative control. After a lengthy stand-off, he finally bowed to trimming some of its muscle and pulling some of its teeth to get DAY made in 1985. It's a fine film, but at the time of its release, it disappointed expectations - not least of all because, by this point in time, you could not cast a glance anywhere in horror without seeing work that Romero had inspired, that was somehow more Romero than actual work coming from the mercurial Romero himself.

Romero with Stephen King - top o' the world, Ma!
In horror movie terms, that's two careers right there, and Romero would resurface in time with a third. In between, he spent years trying to write THE MUMMY for Universal (it never happened, but he would die with ads for THE MUMMY with Tom Cruise mocking his efforts), only to give up and make other significant films - MONKEY SHINES (1988, another Romero "best") and THE DARK HALF (1993, an underrated King adaptation) that were derided by critics and fans alike for not adding to his lore about the living dead. Seven years between THE DARK HALF and BRUISER (2000); five years between BRUISER and the commencement of Romero's second Dead trilogy, LAND OF THE DEAD (2005, featuring Dennis Hopper, no less); eight years between his last film, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (2009), and his dying day. Eight years when AMC's THE WALKING DEAD was the biggest thing on television and drawing huge queues of fans to autograph shows.

To hell with the yo-yo.
On a personal note, I knew George only very slightly. We never met. I interviewed him for HEAVY METAL magazine in 1980 as part of an essay I was writing about a core group of filmmakers - including Cronenberg, Carpenter and Dante - whom I was putting forth as the fathers of a "New Mythology." I came to George armed with questions about why he included the shot of Vladimir Nabokov in DAWN OF THE DEAD, and he disarmed me by saying, "I'm just a fan. It seemed like a good idea to just have it in there." It was my first encounter with a director whose textures were not entirely conscious. He actually apologized to me, explaining "I'm not so much of a film fan as someone who just digs movies." And I thought our talk would really start getting somewhere when I asked him if he had named his vampire hero Martin because, in the bird world, a martin is a swallow. He just laughed. (In my defense, that approach somehow worked with Cronenberg.) In a post-script to the above, when I was learning how to write screenplays and had no idea what in hell to do with them once they were done, I took heed of something I'd heard Francis Coppola saying on television and made use of any acquaintance I had to get my work read. I tracked George Romero down to a phone number in Florida. I could tell from the tension in his voice that it was the last thing he needed - he worked from his own scripts, after all - but he invited me to send it along. I did so, but I never followed up. I understood that his welcoming something from me was already more than I had any right to expect. He was a good man. 



When someone of Romero's stature leaves us, there is a strong desire on the part of the eulogist to be reverent and appreciative and encompassing, but Romero's down-to-earth eloquence as a creator in this field - the field of our nightmares - is virtually irreplaceable. Not because comparable voices aren't out there, but because those voices are not being courted by Hollywood or even regional filmmakers, who tend to produce anything exploitative that their friends can churn out for the DTV market. So for anyone who actually gives a damn and isn't just collecting a buck, George Romero's death feels a lot like our own, and a little righteous anger - a little railing against the dimming of the fucking day - seems in order. We don't have him now, and we didn't have him for a lot of the time he was here among us - with unfilmed scripts in his outstretched hands. Face it, friends: we didn't deserve him. We deserve what we've got, and if you don't know what I mean by that, well, look around. You can't say he didn't warn us.

But then again, what is immortality? Everywhere we look in horror today, there's Romero. His name may not be on it, but it is what it is - and it's what he was.

"Stay scared."
         
(c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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SPOTLIGHT ON A MURDERER reviewed

July 24, 2017, 12:05 pm
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Marianne Koch in dire threat of asphyxiation in SPOTLIGHT ON A MURDERER.


SPOTLIGHT ON A MURDERER
Pleins feux sur l'assassin
1961, Arrow Academy, 1:37:1, 92m (BD/DVD 2 disc set)

Georges Franju's rarely screened follow-up to EYES WITHOUT A FACE reunites him with the ace rewriters of that film, the screenwriting team of Boileau-Narcejac (Pierre and Thomas, respectively), notorious for LES DIABOLIQUES and the novel upon which VERTIGO was based. Here they spice-up the shopworn "Last Will and Testament" premise with an absentee corpse who leaves an especially diabolical will, requiring his abhorrent relatives - the hopeful inheritors of a castle and all its wealth - to live there and maintain its upkeep for five years. This costly sentence goads these n'er-do-wells into setting up the castle as a modern day theater hosting a "sound and light" performance (a kind of externalized radio, telling a story spatially using only projected light and sound effects) at the castle, depicting a legendary murder that took place there in the 15th century, a performance that now becomes the setting for a new series of murders as someone narrows the playing field to beef-up their cut of the inheritance.

It sounds like it couldn't miss, and what's here is attractive and entertaining, but it's also pulled-off with a mildness one doesn't associate with Franju - evidently the fault of interfering, censorious producers. There is some masterful content nevertheless, particularly the initial "sound and light" show (which must have felt wonderful in a darkened theater) and a climactic moment involving a shattered mirror. As Chris Fujiwara notes in an insightful booklet essay, Mario Bava's A BAY OF BLOOD (1971) covers similar ground far more flamboyantly; this film (with a tremendous cast that includes Pierre Brasseur, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Pascale Audret, Dany Saval and Marianne Koch) needed more theatrical panache. I would also go so far as to say that the aspect of modernizing the castle to awaken its ghosts also had more than a little influence on Bava's BARON BLOOD (1972). One does pine for Édith Scob in the Pascale Audret role (as Franju himself did, subsequently), but her absence here made her return all the more welcome in JUDEX (1963).

A typically handsome Arrow presentation, this is a relatively quiet but important release because it finds the company venturing beyond the director's primary titles into the more shadowy passages of his concise but valuable filmography. Your support of this release can only serve to encourage the release of more like it - and we very much need THÉRÈSE DESQUEYROUX, THOMAS THE IMPOSTER and, perhaps most of all, the complete teleseries of L'HOMME SANS VISAGE.

SPOTLIGHT ON A MURDER is short on supplements but does include a marvelous one: a 27m set visit from French television (containing interviews with all the principals, and a priceless moment when we see Franju's humble response to a heartfelt compliment from the interviewer, who speaks for us all). The booklet is especially useful, including the Fujiwara essay, Raymond Durgnat's assessment of the film from his FRANJU book, and an archival CINEMA 61 interview with Boileau-Narcejac and their director, who at the time was looking forward to making FANTOMAS and offers some details about the approach he would have taken. Enjoyable as the Andre Hunebelle films with Jean Marais and Louis de Funés may be, we were robbed.

(c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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AFTER THE FOX reviewed

July 25, 2017, 11:00 am
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Peter Sellers as film director Federico Fabrizi in AFTER THE FOX.


AFTER THE FOX
Caccia alla volpe
1966, Kino Lorber, 2.35:1, 103m (BD Region A)

I suppose I could blame the fox hunting sequence in 1965's CASINO ROYALE for this, but I put off the great pleasure of making this film's acquaintance for decades because it looked from a distance like yet another out-of-control farce, with aging stars having much more fun than I would, running like geese around Europe to more woozily gallivanting Burt Bacharach cues. Mamma mia, was I wrong. This might be one of the best and funniest movies about the misadventure of making movies around, but it has the added bonus of specifically lampooning Italian film production - just as a new set of laws were falling into place that would bring an end to US/Italian studio collaborations almost overnight.

Neil Simon's first original screenplay posits Peter Sellers in the role of Aldo Vanucci, a.k.a. The Fox, a Fantômas-like master criminal (and master of disguise) serving an interminable prison sentence, who suddenly and brilliantly escapes from his cell when he learns from his visiting gang the not-quite-accurate but infalmmatory news that his younger sister (a brunette Britt Ekland) is now walking the streets as a prostitute. After much disguised misadventure (allowing Sellers plentiful opportunity to parade his many faces), he discovers that his delectable sibling is only playing a prostitute in her first movie role. When Vanucci sees the complete deference paid to filmmakers by the general public, and particularly by the police, he realizes that he has been going about the criminal life entirely wrong. Hearing that billions in gold bricks are being transported from Cairo to a small village in rural Italy, he realizes at once how to mastermind the biggest heist of The Fox's career: by posing as an intellectual film director.

Enter "Federico Fabrizi," who uses his self-professed ability to "have ideas" to BS his way through any barrier, including the protective agent (Martin Balsam) of aging Hollywood star Tony Powell (Victor Mature in a somewhat meta role that paves the way to his appearance in HEAD, two years later). Seeing  Fabrizi as a rescue from an early retirement, he eagerly accepts the opportunity to work opposite that new Italian sensation (Vanucci's sister) - the hilariously named "Gina Romantica" - and finds himself being asked to do things like run around without apparent objective because, after all, are we not all running around, never knowing what we are doing? And he loves it! Loves it! Mature's largely untapped gift for comedy, and his robust willingness to parody himself, are only two of the film's many points of appeal.

The great de Sica directing the great faux Fabrizi.

This film was unfortunately the only collaboration of Sellers and director Vittorio de Sica, who seems to have had the rare ability to rein in his frequent excesses to just the right measure to make him charming, elegant, and devastatingly funny. De Sica also appears as himself in a scene that one imagines could have inspired Francis Coppola's appearance in APOCALYPSE NOW) and a superb supporting cast that includes Paolo Stoppa, Lydia Brazzi, and the infallible Akim Tamiroff - in a fez, no less.

Kino's presentation is bright and colorful, conveying a welcome nostalgic sense of what it was like to see these big continental romps on their opening engagements. Aside from the main theme song (by The Hollies and Bacharach), which is far from the best thing either of them did, I find Bacharach's score even more inventive than his celebrated work for CASINO ROYALE, though very much in the same vein. There is no subtitle option. Extras are limited to an original trailer, viewable with Trailers From Hell commentary by screenwriter Larry Karaszewski (a big fan of the movie) and trailers for other Peter Sellers titles available from Kino.     

(c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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Franco's DIE NACHT DER OFFENEN SÄRGE reviewed

July 26, 2017, 11:00 am
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DIE NACHT DER OFFENEN SÄRGE
"The Night of the Open Coffins"
Drácula contra Frankenstein / Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein / The Screaming Dead
1971, Colosseo-Film (Germany), 2.35:1, 82m (BD-A)

Though there has never been any particular shortage of it, Jess Franco's DRÁCULA CONTRA FRANKENSTEIN has always been a much sought-after title by his collectors. It had a badly-pan&scanned VHS release here in the States from Wizard Video back in the 1980s, under the title THE SCREAMING DEAD, after which it surfaced with modest letterboxing and a different title sequence in Japan, a version subsequently marketed here through Bill Knight's mail-order company Midnight Video. There have been subsequent DVD releases, both here and abroad, but they have always been marred by something - usually an inaccurate aspect ratio. This new German Blu-ray release, region-free, is the first ever to present the film in its authentic 2.35:1 format, but it's still not all that we hoped for. The nudity promised by a swatch of German lobby cards, for instance, does not materialize on this disc, which strongly suggests we may never see the alternate "adult" version that exists for so many other Franco titles.

The film is one of those dashed-off-on-a-napkin Franco plots: When Dracula's reign of terror is finally foiled, Dr. Frankenstein arrives in Transylvania (in a limousine driven by a misshapen chauffeur - though the film, up to that time, has the look of a period piece) and reactivates the vampire with his laboratory equipment, enslaving him to do his bidding. Drunk with success, Frankenstein unleashes his "New Gods" on the village - causing Amira, a gypsy sorceress (Geneviève Deloir, the future Mrs. Ivan Reitman, giving the film's best performance), to invoke the return of the Wolf Man on the night of the full moon.

DRÁCULA CONTRA FRANKENSTEIN is generally regarded as part of a trilogy; it was directly followed by DAUGHTER OF DRACULA (which began as a remake of Franco's earlier THE SADISTIC BARON VON KLAUS, but was talked into incorporating unused and new footage of Howard Vernon as Count Dracula, making it an implicit prequel explaining the origin of the Count's coffin companion, played by Britt Nichols) and then THE EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN (a wild romp inspired by the erotic horror comics coming out of France at the time). Franco often spoke in interviews of his dislike for most Hammer films, stating his preference for Universal horror and, even more so, the expressionism of silent horror pictures. True to his word, this film can be viewed as a rough sketch of what filmmakers raised on the stage productions of Max Reinhardt might have made of Universal's three great terror titans.

It's an unabashed Monster Rally, a HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN or a VAN HELSING of its time, and Franco delves into the challenges of such a picture armed with little more than his love for such things and the promise to deliver one. Despite these shortcomings, they conspire to create a kind of hyper-reality in which all chronologies, geographies, even characters from different movies get shuffled together. It is a movie to be enjoyed simply on the level of sustained mayhem and delirium. In this version of the film (which is lacking a brief onscreen text by that revered authority on supernatural topics "David Khune" and some narrated diary scribblings by Frankenstein), there is literally no spoken dialogue for the first 18 minutes; the cinematography (credited to José Climent) has a quality so baroque as to appear gnostic; the soundtrack plays needle drops with a barnstorming Bruno Nicolai score, much as Godard used Georges Delerue's few cues in CONTEMPT; and the make-up is comparable to what you might see in a high school play.

Watching the film again, it occurred to me that the wily Franco may have also been using this film for the more covert purpose of lampooning the kind of old-fashioned Spanish horror being put forth by his colleague Paul Naschy. The werewolf (played by someone identified only as Brandy) is particularly poor, his appearances signaled with an ancient wolf howl sound effect heard in many a Naschy picture. Furthermore, the film's Spanish title is a flagrant steal of the export title for a Naschy picture best known in English as ASSIGNMENT: TERROR (1968, which has had VHS release here as DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN), itself an all-star monster rally. But Franco never made films that work only on a single level, so poking fun at his rival would not have been his only goal with this. Indeed, DRÁCULA CONTRA FRANKENSTEIN embodies a conflation of so many commercial and experimental approaches to cinema that it feels radical in its construction, even in its raucous primitivism and disregard for continuity, despite the material's overall familiarity.

One hopes that the more adult version of this film that was apparently shot will surface at some later date. Till then, this Colosseo presentation is the best we have. It is sourced from an Italian print - screen title: I MAESTRI BLACK HORROR: DRACULA CONTRO FRANKENSTEIN; the aspect ratio is correct, but claims Cinemascope instead of its actual four-perf Techniscope format, which may be somewhat to blame for the image's overall softness. The image generally lacks the sharpness we associate with digital releases and particularly with digital restorations. The soundtrack is offered in German, Spanish and Italian (the wretched SCREAMING DEAD English track is not in evidence), while subtitles are included in German and English. The extras include a nice 10m featurette documenting an undated visit by Franco and Lina Romay to Germany (where he makes a heartwarming reference to "a critic, a nice guy in the States" who once said that "you cannot see one of my films until you have seen them all." There is also an artwork gallery, a restoration demonstration (which shows the elimination of a lot of green speckling), and German-language liner notes by Gerald Kuklinski.

Most easily obtained Stateside from Diabolik DVD or Amazon.de.


(c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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BEYOND THE DOOR reviewed

July 27, 2017, 11:00 am
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BEYOND THE DOOR
Chi sei? / "Who Goes There?"
1974, Code Red, 1.85:1, BD-A, 108m

I had the unforgettable good fortune to see Ovidio Assonitis' BEYOND THE DOOR in its first release, in a multiplex that was also showing (unbelievably) FLESH GORDON, MANDINGO and LINDA LOVELACE FOR PRESIDENT. (As Lou Reed sang, those were different times.) While I had a sneaking suspicion of what was probably coming, the lights went down on an audience whose like I had never seen before in attendance at run-of-the-mill horror pictures; they were clearly anticipating another experience on the level of William Friedkin's THE EXORCIST, not quite realizing that such things come only once in a lifetime. Seven minutes later, and I am probably being generous in my estimation of the time, the walk-outs began.

I couldn't call BEYOND THE DOOR a "guilty pleasure" because I don't really feel any guilt for my film-related pleasures, but it is a film I've come to treasure for how riotously wrong it is, on so many counts - but, as time has gone on, I've also acquired a deeper appreciation for what, against all odds, is good about it. The story, in brief, is about a record producer whose wife, formerly involved with a man named Dmitri, begins acting strangely as a result of a pact that Dmitri has made with the Devil - while poised mid-fall through a suicidal car dive off a coastal cliff. She becomes both pregnant and possessed and Dmitri is offered a chance at escape from his pending ever-lasting torment if he can abort the child. To make matters still more preposterous, the woman - Jessica Barrett (Juliet Mills) - has already given birth to two children, Gail (Barbara Fiorini) and Ken (David Colin, Jr.), who are as much like Hellspawn as you'd care to imagine. They're both potty-mouthed poster children for OCD, with Gail a compulsive reader and collector of LOVE STORY paperbacks (hence her vocabulary) and Ken forever suckling at cans of Campbell's Green Pea soup. The kids are, in some ways, the best reason to see it, and their dialogue - attributed to no less than eight screenwriters on the IMDb - is enough to make you doubt your own sanity. (Like this from Gail, when her little brother wakes up crying: "Ken. What's the matter? You're gonna blow my mind. Man, if you don't quit crying, you're gonna have a real bad trip.") They also pass, in the context of this film, as acceptable - possibly because the family pediatrician and friend, Dr. George Staton (Nino Segurini), looks like Chevy Chase doing a vintage SNL skit.
 
Produced for $350,000 and shot on location in San Francisco with interiors filmed at De Paolis Studios in Rome, BEYOND THE DOOR actually contains some good material. Much like Elke Sommer in THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM, Juliet Mills commits to giving the best performance possible as the possessed Jessica, and her portrayal is potent and occasionally extremely eerie. She is assisted by some uncredited effects work by Wally Gentleman (2001, THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME, ONE FROM THE HEART) and Donn Davison (who shot inserts for the ASYLUM OF THE INSANE variant of David Friedman's SHE-FREAK) that, all these years later, still beg to viewer to pause and deconstruct them. Richard Johnson, formerly of THE HAUNTING and THE WITCH IN LOVE and barrelling toward the Lucio Fulci end of his career, also brings great authority to the part of Dmitri. And then we have Gabriele Lavia as Jessica's husband Robert Barrett (which happens to be the name of one of the film's screenwriters - R. Barrett), who is introduced in a recording studio, producing a new reggae track by a mostly black band, bobbing his head wildly out of time, and then cutting them off in the midst of a respectable take, complaining that "it's got about as much balls as a castrrated jellyfish." You know you're in good hands with that line, but I don't remember hearing it in the theater. The English dubbing, by the way, includes Mills and Johnson's own voices, with Ted Rusoff voicing Gabriele Lavia and his wife Carolyn de Fonseca voicing Carla Mancini, who plays the creepily Alida Valli-like woman on the boat.


 
This new dual-layered Blu-ray from Code Red - available from Diabolik DVD - is not quite the BEYOND THE DOOR we remember from its theatrical playdates. Carrying the title THE DEVIL WITHIN HER (which was already taken by an AIP release starring Joan Collins, the US retitling of a British picture called I DON'T WANT TO BE BORN!), this is the original English export version which contains approximately 10 minutes of footage that was cut from the picture by Edward L. Montoro's company Film Ventures International. Not only does the additional footage include some of Mills' and Johnson's best work in this picture, but there is some additional humor (like the opening recording studio sequence) and an overall more languid pace that makes sense of some of the spaced-out tone of the piece. Best of all, by going back to the original cut, this release avails itself of a razor-sharp, richly colorful picture quality that was never on view in US theaters, where the film looked fuzzy and grainy with watery colors in its multiplex incarnation.

While this Code Red disc would need that alternate theatrical cut to qualify as definitive, this is an impressive presentation nevertheless. The HD master is identified as brand new and there are quite a few extras, including VW's Nathaniel Thompson interviewing Ovidio Assonitis in the first commentary, and VW's Darren Gross moderating a third audio track with Juliet Mills and Scott Spiegel. There is also a "BEYOND THE DOOR: 35 Years Later" featurette that interviews Assonitis, Mills, Johnson and script contributor Alex Rebar (who remembers Johnson rewriting his dialogue), and a separate interview with Gabriele Lavia. The packaging features reversible cover art, allowing a choice of original art or the original Film Ventures campaign. 

(c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
   
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THE FABULOUS BARON MUNCHAUSEN (BARON PRÁŠIL) reviewed

July 28, 2017, 7:00 am
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THE FABULOUS BARON MUNCHAUSEN
(BARON PRÁŠIL)
1961, Second Run (UK), 1.37:1, BD-ABC, 85m (163m of supplements)

To watch a Karel Zeman film is to feel that all other filmmakers are impeded, that they were short-changed on the day the Angels distributed the tools of filmmaking. Pick a random Zeman film and you will see his mastery of black-and-white and color; live-action and animation; collage and sculpture; sobriety and humor; science and imagination. His creativity is like a fountain; it never stops flowing, never stops its own endless reinvention. A simple shot of a rose in the moonlight is enough to bring us to our knees.

Zeman, a Czech filmmaker who lived from 1910 to 1989 and made films from 1946 to 1980 (his first feature, CESTA DO PRAVEKU / JOURNEY TO THE BEGINNING OF TIME, in 1955), belongs in the ranks of animators who became directors: Georges Méliès, Ladislas Starewicz, George Pal, Frank Tashlin, and even Mario Bava - but he is particularly well-placed among Pal and Starewicz, and a third filmmaker who never graduated to stage direction: Lotte Reiniger (best-known for her animated cut-out feature THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED, 1926). As a child, Zeman fell in love with the stories of Jules Verne and the illustrations of Gustave Doré and became a confirmed fantasist. His aforementioned debut begins realistically, with live action, but then almost imperceptibly melds into fantasy as a group of boys on a nature trip find themselves face-to-face with creatures that never existed in their own time. His second feature, VYNÁLEZ ZKÁZY / A DEADLY INVENTION (1958; released in English territories as THE FABULOUS ADVENTURES OF JULES VERNE), was a far more radical and delightful creation, a melding of different Verne scenarios into an original story, told in a conglomeration of live-action, trick shots, and animation that brought Verne's original book illustrations uncannily to life. After more than half a century, it remains the most commercially successful Czech film of all time - and the primary reason why there now exists a Karel Zeman Museum in Prague. This same museum has made it their mission to see Zeman's groundbreaking work better known and more fully appreciated; some years ago, they began releasing DVDs of his work, with VYNÁLEZ ZKÁZY released as a solo (and English-friendly) Blu-ray disc, while Zeman's first three films have also been released by them as a single-disc Blu-ray. Now the British label Second Run, which has long specialized in Eastern European cinema and previously released Zeman's BLÁZNOVA KRONICA / A JESTER'S TALE on DVD, has entered the picture with a glorious 4K restoration of what is arguably the filmmaker's greatest film, one that is tempting to interpret as a testamental work thought it perversely arrived well before the midpoint of his career: BARON PRÁŠIL / THE FABULOUS BARON MUNCHAUSEN (1961).

The tall tales collected in THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN - based on the public exaggerations of a nobleman so named, written and published by Rudolf Erich Raspe in 1785 - were well-plundered by other filmmakers from Méliès to Josef von Baky by the time Zeman got around to filming them, so he took a unique approach. He saw Munchausen not as a figure to mock or ridicule, but to revere; he saw him as the avatar of all imagination and human invention, invention that would someday take us to the Moon. His film opens by taking us from our species' lowly origins beyond what was then the summit of our achievements, to the footprints of man on the Moon - footage now astonishing for how exactly it visualizes our documentation of scientific miracles now well in our past. There, the first lunar lander - identified only as Moonman or Tony (Rudolf Jelinek) - is surprised to be welcomed by the three protagonists of Verne's FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON, by Cyrano de Bergerac, and Baron Munchausen himself (Miloš Kopeckÿ). These fantastical figures, romantics all, offer the Moonman the temptations of silver lunar wine and what appears to be a broom-riding space siren (and another, more beholden to science, held aloft by two balloons), but find him too pragmatic and earthly to believe in them. Therefore, they determine that it is on Earth where this adventurer truly belongs. The Baron escorts him back him personally aboard a great ship carried through space by a team of winged horses. Landing in Turkey, the Baron meets with the Sultan (THE CREMATOR's Rudolf Hrušinskÿ) for assistance, and in his great palace they discover that the beautiful - and remarkably passive - Princess Bianca (Jana Brejchová) is being held prisoner. (The almost three-dimensional shot entering the palace is probably one of my 10 favorite shots in all of cinema.) Both men are instantly enamored, but it is the Baron - for whom no feat is impossible - who asserts that she must be rescued and a kidnapping in the only manly means of doing so.
 
The balance of the film finds the three principal characters besting one outrageous jam by even more outrageous means, including being swallowed by a gigantic sea monster. But the actual drama of the piece is the urbane Baron's bafflement over the fact that the Princess prefers the unimaginative Tony to him as a suitor, in which one recognizes a philosophical contest between cold scientific logic and brave-hearted imaginative abandon. (The film also allows for a third reality, "the language of high democracy," which is spoken to and by rulers and politicians as so much meaningless blowing and slurring into a harmonica.) Without revealing too much, suffice to say that the pragmatist finds his way to dreaming through love and dreams up something that the good Baron can use to help them live happily ever after. The Baron, meanwhile, learns that romance may belong to the moon and the stars, but love itself is by nature an earthly thing.

I am tempted to say that no film has ever benefited quite so much from 4K restoration as this one. The Czech Blu-rays were lovely, but this disc is razor-sharp with sometimes astonishing illusions of depth. The purity of the colors is awe-inducing, and I suspect that if the film was not so wittily grounded in humor, the work as a whole might be alienating in the sheer aggression and accumulation of its beauty. There are instances when the live-action components of individual shots look a trifle soft, but this has to do with how the shots were filmed and processed and layered. Second Run and the Zeman Museum have asserted the film's Czech nationality by presenting the film only with a Czech language track. In the 1990s, around the time Terry Gilliam (inspired in large part by this film) made his own ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN, Image Entertainment released the Zeman picture on LaserDisc as THE ORIGINAL ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN with an English-dubbed soundtrack, so completists may want to acquire this as well.

Second Run's optionally subtitled Blu-ray disc runs welcomely riot with nearly three hours of supplementary extras, the most important being Tomáš Hodan's 2015 documentary FILM ADVENTURER KAREL ZEMAN (102m), which includes interviews with the likes of Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton and many who knew Zeman personally. It is remarkable for the sheer plentitude of its behind the scenes footage - as one witness observes, Zeman had no fear of visitors peering into his techniques because there was nothing to steal but the intangibles of vision and hard work. It is a superb introduction to the subject, and exactly what you will want to see after the intoxicant of the main feature. It also documents a group of contemporary film students working together to recreate on film one of MUNCHAUSEN's most memorable illusions. Additionally, there are various essential documentary briefs ported over from the Zeman Museum releases, a nearly-half-hour spoken and illustrated essay by Michael Brooke about the real and fictional Munchausen and much about this film in particular (including a marvelous appreciation of Zdenēk Liška's endlessly inventive score), a trailer and a 16-page booklet featuring an informative and contextualizing essay by Graham Williamson.

Perhaps it goes without saying in light of all I've just said, but this is one of the most important HD releases of 2017 and warmly recommended. The region-free disc can be obtained directly from Second Run or from retailers such as Amazon.co.uk.

(c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.             
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Catching Up With Your Friendly Neighborhood Blogger

August 3, 2017, 4:07 pm
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It has been awhile since I've posted anything like an autobiographical blog entry, and many of you have kindly encouraged me to keep you posted on my current activities since we don't have the Kennel listings to guide you anymore. As it happens, I've been extremely productive and fortunate this year, and here's a sampler of just some of the things I can tell you about (or at least a little about):

I'm over 100 pages into a new book about a maverick filmmaker, but I'm not quite ready to announce that project.

I've also agreed to write two books for Neil Snowdon's Midnight Movies Monograph series (Electric Dreamhouse/PS Publishing) - one about Georges Franju's JUDEX (which will probably happen second) and another that hasn't yet been announced.

Speaking of PS Publishing, and Neil, my lengthy chapter on Nigel Kneale's literary works is part of their new book WE ARE THE MARTIANS: THE LEGACY OF NIGEL KNEALE, edited by Neil Snowdon.

And in what I personally consider my most exciting news, a very well-respected publishing house overseas recently accepted the first piece of lengthy fiction I've sold in twelve years. It will likely be published sometime late next year or early the following. It seems something happens with my fiction every twelve years; there were a dozen years between THROAT SPROCKETS and THE BOOK OF RENFIELD, and now a dozen years between RENFIELD and this one. It's not for lack of writing, just for lack of energy in showing that work around.

I'm also pleased to report that my work in audio commentary is continuing to pile up. My commentaries for the 50th Anniversary edition of Sergio Leone's THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (Kino Studio Classics), Mario Bava's ERIK THE CONQUEROR (Arrow Films), and no less than three already-recorded Joe Sarno titles are presently awaiting release, as well as a few other as-yet-unannounced titles. I am presently working on two commentaries simultaneously, and they will be followed later this month my continuation on the Sergio Leone series with A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS.

So there is a lot of me to look forward to! If you would care to know more in the meantime, I am the guest on the current episode (#27) of Bill Ackerman's excellent podcast Supporting Characters. In my day-to-day life, I actually speak very little, but somehow Bill managed to keep me talking for more than four hours! Fortunately he tightened the recording up a bit by extracting some hemming and hawing, and I am pleased to direct you to the final result here.

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First Look: Kino Lorber's THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

August 7, 2017, 1:34 pm
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Kino Lorber Studio Classics is set to release their 50th Anniversary Blu-ray edition of Sergio Leone's THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (1967) one week from tomorrow, on August 15. I had the good fortune of being invited to provide the audio commentary for the US theatrical cut of the film, which most fans seem to feel is the definitive version and is making its Blu-ray debut in this release. It's a two-disc set and both the theatrical cut (162 minutes) and the extended cut (179 minutes) are included, both versions treated to 4K restorations. The extended cut is offered in this same set with optional audio commentaries by Sir Christopher Frayling and Richard Schickel.

As a contributor to the set, I received an advance copy of the set today, so I thought I might whet my readers' appetites with an advance peek. (Click on images to enlarge.) There has been some concern among the film's most ardent devotées about how this release is going to look, since MGM's previous Blu-ray release had a pervasive golden tint that was never part of the film's cinematography. As you see, that aspect has been eradicated. The blues in this new transfer are handsomely reasserted, and the depth of some compositions is actually dizzying. This film was shot in Technicolor and Techniscope, the latter being a two-perforation scope process that led to it being termed "the poor man's CinemaScope" back in the day. When I was a kid, and seeing a lot of sword-and-sandal pictures at my local theater, I could pick a Techniscope film out of a line-up because they were prey to excessive grain and a coarseness of detail, especially in depth. So I am sometimes astounded today by how much detail and depth it is now possible to digitally exhume from old Techniscope film - and Leone and Tonino Delli Colli choose their shots in this film as though they could see the technology coming that would someday unlock all of its power. Love seeing the original UA logo card back, too.











 


 




Pre-order now and get yours... for a few dollars less.

Text (c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.



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Sarno's RED ROSES OF PASSION An Overlooked Gem

August 15, 2017, 12:25 pm
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Patricia McNair is up to some suburban witchcraft in Joe Sarno's RED ROSES OF PASSION.

You may have had the same feeling, but sometimes I see a film that so impresses me I'm reluctant to go back and watch it again. I once put Eric Rohmer's PERCIVAL in my Top Ten on the basis of a single viewing, and - even as a long-standing Rohmer champion - was nowhere near so impressed on the second pass. Such has also been the case since my first viewing of Joe Sarno's RED ROSES OF PASSION (1966) about 15 years ago, which I reviewed with great favor back in VIDEO WATCHDOG #85. I love Sarno's work - I'm even writing a book about it now - but could this really be the knock-out I remembered?

I hate to say it (because I would have much preferred it to come out as part of Film Movement's Joseph W. Sarno Retrospect Series, and had the chance to do a proper commentary for it), but I was - if anything - even more impressed by my second viewing of RED ROSES OF PASSION last night. Vinegar Syndrome has now released it in a DVD/BD dual pack and the camera neg-sourced transfer is gorgeous. (The main titles appear to have been digitally overlaid.) Not really about sex so much as sensuality, it's not only one of Sarno's best realized pictures, but perhaps his most strikingly original story; it's a kind of horror fable (in that regard, rather like Jess Franco's LORNA THE EXORCIST) that looks at erotic inhibition and licentiousness through an occult lens. If you can imagine what Herk Harvey, for example, might have done with a remake of Romero's HUNGRY WIVES - that'll point you somewhere near the right direction.) It's astonishing to me that a film this potent and original could still be so little-known.

The VS set is a limited edition of 2000 copies and apparently prone to the odd bad pressing; I had to return mine to Amazon today because the soundtrack on the Blu-ray disc was badly distorted. (Knowing how cheaply Sarno was sometimes obliged to work, it took me about 15 minutes to question the sound quality by putting on the other disc.) The DVD looked almost as sharp as the BD and sounded fine.

The only extra is a 20m monologue by Sarno authority Michael Bowen. He's a genial talker and knows his stuff. I smiled a lot because I've been covering much of the same tricky ground and coming up against the same questions in my own research.

(c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

 
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The Bava Book at 10

August 23, 2017, 9:00 pm
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Free Pass through August 31!
Now with more extras! Click book to access.
It's hard to believe, but today marks the 10th Anniversary of the arrival of printed copies of MARIO BAVA ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK at our doorstep.

It was a traumatic arrival, midwived by two large delivery trucks, whose drivers proceeded to fill our dining room and foyer with towers of heavy boxes, each containing three shrink-wrapped copies and weighing 39 pounds. Somehow the wooden floors of our old house, built in 1907, stood up to the crushing punishment and we lived that way for weeks, moving from here to there through tight passages between the boxes. Postmen who showed up to take the outgoing cursed under their breaths, but the patrons who pre-ordered blessed us and sent us photos of their children being crushed by the almighty monster. It all balanced out, and now (as those lucky enough to secure a copy know) it is What It Is. There's not a deluxe imprint out there that hasn't tried to make something even bigger and unwieldy in response.

Donna and I were wondering what we could possibly do to commemorate this important date. Unfortunately, the stars are not yet in alignment for us to undertake a revised edition. I am presently swamped with audio commentary work and there was no time or opportunity for me to produce something new for it. So what we've decided to do is to update the Digital Edition with more archival bells and whistles pertaining to its research and release.

Here is a list of the new audio-visual contents added to the Digital Edition today: 

  • My original interviews with Vincent Price (1975 - the first interview conducted for the book) and Cameron Mitchell (1989) - Audio, both released complete for the first time!
  • A webcam promotional interview with Tim & Donna Lucas, conducted by research associate Lorenzo Codelli, with a guest panel consisting of Lamberto Bava, Joe Dante, Kim Newman and Alan Jones, recorded in Trieste on November 16, 2007. (I was later told that Daria Nicolodi was in the audience for this event!)
  • The Bava Book Behind-the-Scenes, including our First Peek at a preview copy, the arduous and precarious Delivery (uncut - because, as Donna says, "Why shouldn't they share our anguish?"), and the packing and shipping process out of our home!
  • Tim & Donna at the Saturn Awards in Los Angeles, 2008 - introduced by actor John Saxon and including our acceptance of the Award for Special Achievement!
  • Select examples of stills and posters BEFORE and AFTER the meticulous restoration work!
  • All this, PLUS an IMPROVED Table of Contents spread, with films and multimedia now listed ALPHABETICALLY for your greater convenience!

It's also now available in HTML-5, so it can be viewed on all web browsers without the addition of Flash.

So, what are all these new bells and whistles going to cost you? Well, you know us: NOT A CENT!

If you've already bought and downloaded the book, download it again and your copy will be automatically upgraded.

If you still haven't bought the Bava book, we are offering everyone a Free Pass to sample the new HTML format online, browse it, read it, live with it ABSOLUTELY FREEthrough August 31. No log-in required.

If you already know this is something you need and can't live without, you can buy it here and have it forever for the regular sale price. We appreciate your continued support.

Donna has been doing all the work on this upgrade, so I asked to summarize it in her own words. This is what she said:

"Now the digital Bava Book is the way I always imagined it could be! Not only does it look like the original, it's more functional and entertaining! The addition of trailers and interviews, home movies, and the "before" shots of the stills and posters we worked with will give readers a more complete picture of Bava's life and times, and the work and skill involved in creating a book of this size! I want to add more... and the great thing is, I can! I will! And updates are free!"

So, what are you waiting for? Go get yours NOW.

(c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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One For the Grandkids: TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN

September 4, 2017, 2:38 pm
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"I should follow YOU?"
- Miles Davis, to a fan expressing his wish that he go back to playing ballads

At the end of Episode 16 of Showtime's TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN, we saw Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) briefly rescued from mid-life marriage to a man who was something less than the man to whom she once aspired by an invitation to dance. She then returned to her husband's side and a reality-shattering crash through that illusion into what appeared to be a confrontational collision with her own makeup mirror. I spent the past week wondering where this scene would take us. In a way, it took us nowhere, because we don't see Audrey again in the miniseries' last two episodes; then again, this scene tells us exactly where we are headed.

The last two episodes, or hours (if we accept - as I think we should - David Lynch's description of this latest collaboration with Mark Frost as "an eighteen-hour film" rather than a miniseries) of this story suggest to me a one-hour or 90-minute story with a 15-16 hour prologue and a one-hour epilogue. It does not accommodate traditional narrative structure, and therefore is doomed to disappoint most audience expectations geared to that experience. Many times as the weekly chapters rolled out, I found myself responding to them not as narrative, not even as cinema, but as digital painting - making use of live actors selected much like emotional colors. As some others have observed, the quality of the digital effects suggested an unusual transparency that might look bad or cheap to those whose standard of measure was reality; but I always felt the point was never to suggest reality but different graphic ideas put into motion. A noble attempt to reclaim the viewer's right to suspend disbelief with their own senses, rather than have the technology rob them of that privilege. As the entire arc of the program is revealed, this level of artifice has a point to make.

As with the original series finale, the general response I've been seeing has been disappointment, even anger, sometimes followed by a slowly blooming acceptance and enthusiasm. The disappointment, I believe, comes from a thwarted authorial impulse: it didn't go where we wanted it to go. But as characters in the story have been saying, "The past dictates the future." Therefore, any attempt to return to the past is a sentimental urge, a romanticism doomed to failure or, if indeed such contact is made, we run the risk of monkeying with our present vantage point in the future. Which is exactly the trajectory of the final chapter. In the last moments, when Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) asks "What year is this?" I don't think he's asking which year he's inhabiting. Rather, he's questioning our expectations of the narrative, our demands for clarity and a happy ending - even a satisfying reunion. Why did we want to go back to a murder scene? What did we want to undo? Or do? Were these characters not supposed to change - though we, their creator and television itself has?

And finally, Cooper is also asking the wrong question, which points to a suggestion of his condemnation to another long detour through mystic circles - his penance for his ego in assuming superhuman responsibilities and a god-like role in setting everything right. When Cooper and Diane (Laura Dern) risk "changing everything" by riding the electrical coordinates to new identities, they soon lose each other and Dale finds himself alone in the American west, in the city of Odessa. It's not only the name of a Ukrainian city, but the feminine form of Odysseus or Ulysses, the hero of Homer's THE ODYSSEY, and finally a Greek word meaning "full of wrath." (The ODYSSEY connection to Cooper is quite interesting, particularly if we consider the interpretation that it took Odysseus so many years of wandering to return home because he didn't want to go home.) The Cooper whom we see cruising the streets of this melting pot American city is neither the all-good Cooper of the original series, nor the Bad Cooper, whose negative energies have been conquered by this point, or at least redistributed. As earlier events have shown us, Cooper's efforts came very close to saving Laura retroactively - indeed, he does seem to prevent her murder, at least on one plane of existence - but in doing so, he interfered with her own karmic destiny and sent that compulsory drama elsewhere to find its fulfillment.

But he has not yet learned this lesson, and when he sees the fateful name Judy on a restaurant sign in Odessa, he follows the sign to a breakfast interrupted by the modern-day equivalent of an Old West shootout, as he butts in to save a stranger's honor. The melting pot signs (Odessa, Maersk, etc), the open carry laws, people living in accordance with romantic ideas of freedom in a conspicuously unfree word...  Lynch's purpose here is plain - this is the America we now I habit, viewed through a pair of THEY LIVE eyeglasses, as it were. Cooper continues to take lawful responsibility for Laura Palmer's metaphysical fate by tracing Judy to her lookalike counterpart - an apparent kook and murderess whose name is not Judy but rather Carrie Page (Sheryl Lee) - and hoping to discharge the evil energies riding her existence by introducing her to her mother (Grace Zabriskie), who is dealing with devils of her own. But it's no longer her house... for the rather obvious reason that "You can't go home anymore." What Cooper may suddenly be inhabiting outside the Palmer house is not a different year, but a different tense - namely, reality. (This reading of the ending would appear to be supported by the casting of Mary Reber, the real-life owner of the Palmer House property, as its present owner Alice Tremond.)


In short, David Lynch and Mark Frost have addressed themselves to the fact that art is a thing of process and progress that does not move in reverse; only the longing of the human heart does that. In so doing, it may well motivate the creation of art, but such art is usually wrenching in its torment, bringing us to terms with more innocent times that were never really so innocent, the nostalgic songs that closer scrutiny reveal to come from places of real pain, the high school sweetheart who got away and fired a bullet through the brain of the fellow lucky enough to catch her. Because what such investigations usually signify is that the present, our present, is in some way unsatisfactory - but if we dare to move back, we risk changing or losing connection with where we were. 

The original TWIN PEAKS series still exists, and that experience can be repeated to the heart's content, leaving THE RETURN to warn us of the myriad dangers awaiting anyone careless enough to rifle backwards through the spent pages of life. 

(c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved. 

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RIP Basil Gogos (1929-2017)

September 15, 2017, 1:41 pm
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I swear to you, one of my first thoughts upon awakening yesterday morning was of the first time I met Basil Gogos. It was October 1994 and I was at the Chiller Theater convention in Secaucus, NJ, helping Barbara Steele with her table when I heard that Basil Gogos was down the hall, setting up his own table. I hightailed it right over there, found him setting things out on his table and speaking with an attractive younger woman seated behind it (I later learned this was his partner, artist Linda Touby); I grabbed him by the hand and told him that I had to rush over and tell him how very much his work had enriched my life. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Linda smile and look down; I still don't know if she was smiling because she was pleased to see him so appreciated or amused because she heard this from everyone meeting him for the first time.

And now I've just heard that Basil has passed away the day before yesterday, September 13, at age 88 (though some Internet sources list him some 20 years younger), in time for him to have sent me that waking thought. No cause has been reported, but I imagine it had something to do with the Parkinson's disease that has evidently been part of his life now for some years.

Though he was not the first artist to paint a cover for FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND, Basil (then a veteran illustrator for men's adventure magazines) literally blazed the trail for horror and monster portraiture, single-handedly defining the glory of the painted monster magazine cover, turning images coined for exploitation into the finest of fine art - feral poses and bestial, skeletal faces splashed with all the colors of fright and passion. He began with the image of Vincent Price's Roderick Usher on the cover of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND #9, and - incredibly - though his artwork (sometimes recycled) appeared on fewer than 45 covers in the magazine's 25-year, 191-issue run, his work arguably defined the flavor and the potential of the magazine in ways its photo-heavy, juvenile interior could only hint at. He also provided covers for other Warren Publications, including SCREEN THRILLS ILLUSTRATED and SPACEMEN, but Warren seemed to tap him to launch new ventures rather than to sustain them.  Remarkably, he had provided only 15 covers for FAMOUS MONSTERS before there was an unexplained parting of the ways that led to his being replaced by the likes of Ron Cobb, Vic Prezio, Ken Kelly and various photo covers, and even some reprises of his covers (Claude Rains' PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, GORGO) on later issues. (Discovering how rarely his work actually appeared on FM's covers, in contrast to the seismic cultural impact they had, is like realizing that Christopher Lee appears for only eight minutes in HORROR OF DRACULA.)

Upon the death of Boris Karloff in February 1969, Warren Publications wisely arranged for Gogos' return, and his elegiac portrait of Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein Monster for the cover of FM's Karloff Memorial issue (# 56) proved an instant classic. Looking back, in some ways, this cover and issue were my introduction to the mourning process and something in me, now, wants to relight its beautifully rendered candle for Basil.

The return of Gogos to the covers of FAMOUS MONSTERS was the beginning of a second and even longer streak of classic cover paintings: Jonathan Frid as DARK SHADOWS' Barnabas Collins; Fredric March as Mr. Hyde; Hurd Hatfield as Dorian Gray; Vincent Price in HOUSE OF WAX. But within the year, the magazine resorted to another recycling, this time of Lon Chaney's razor-toothed vampire from LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT, FM's cover for #20 reformatted for #69. As fans, we patiently awaited the next Gogos cover. His last for the magazine came with an extraordinary portrait of Prudence Hyman as Hammer's THE GORGON for the cover of FM 179, in 1981. In a terrible lapse of judgement, a photograph of Arnold Schwarzeneggar from CONAN THE BARBARIAN was allowed to intrude upon and share the composition.

At the time I met Basil, he was doing covers for Steven Smith's fine new magazine MONSTERSCENE. I presented him with some copies of VIDEO WATCHDOG, and though he was later very complimentary about the content, we both had a chuckle when the first words out of his mouth were a disappointed "Oh, you do photo covers..." I have no idea what he was paid for his cover art, but - till the very last issue of VW - I always found the hardest job to be working out adequate compensation for our cover artists, because Gogos had instilled in me so much respect for that work. He was a soft-spoken, cheerful, and humble man and I wasn't prepared to insult him by making him an offer I considered to be far beneath him. His brushes had conjured so many of the contours of my young imagination; he articulated with greater skill than my young self could muster a real passion for the monsters I loved, and therefore taught me something of love and passion. His mastery of color prepared me to love Mario Bava. My favorite of all his works is his portrait of Ingrid Pitt, done for the cover of MONSTERSCENE; Ingrid was at that Chiller show too, and I know that she was deeply pleased and flattered by it. (How could she have felt otherwise, beholding the difference between a performance and a piece of iconography?) I was fortunate enough to have been standing there as she voiced her appreciation and he returned it by saying it was his great honor to work with such a beautiful subject.

Since his passing was announced on Facebook last night, I have seen countless postings on my news feed by artists who have said, in their own ways, much the same thing - and I realized from this outpouring of gratitude that Basil Gogos was not just a seminal cultural figure but a germinal one; he presented to us largely untapped territory that was there for everyone's future mining. And the most wonderful thing about this influence of Gogos is that everyone he inspired paints differently; no one really paints like him. Basil remains unique. What his students derive from his example is permission to paint monsters with love and empathy and joy and absolute freedom. 

Valé to the great Gogos, who taught so many of us how to see in the dark.

(c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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What Am I Going To Watch Tonight?

October 8, 2017, 4:54 pm
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Those of us who share the over-acquisitive home video gene are almost certain to share another problem: the never-ending challenge of deciding what to watch. One of the great pleasures of owning a sizeable film collection is being able to act on the whim of wanting to see something, but such whims are actually rare - or at least seem so, in the shadow of an enormous archive of possible options.

Of course there are days when a new title comes into our hands on its day of release, something we've been anticipating for weeks and must watch right away... but if for some reason we don't, it's curious how quickly a new disc can begin to merge with the sheer absorbing mass of all the titles we've owned for years.

Other strange things happen once a disc is thus absorbed. When a collection soars into the thousands, David Lean suddenly stands on common ground with Edward D. Wood, Jr. - budget means nothing, epic vision means nothing, stars mean nothing, everything is reduced to the title on the spine and what resides of a film on the thumbnail of our memory. I've found that movies titles begin to lose all associative meaning when you look at more than two side-by-side; even a Blu-ray box set (and all we've spent to acquire it) begins to look strangely equal to the DVD-R we made of an old WOR broadcast and packaged inside one of our better Photoshop cover creations. Nowadays, we don't even have to be a collector to feel stonewalled by sheer variety; we experience the same thing when we're confronted with all those thumbnails on Netflix. I'm convinced that one of the major reasons for the popularity of series bingeing is that moving on to the next episode saves us from that fruitless torment of having to decide what to watch next.

Like many of you, I'm sure, I tend to give no thought whatsoever to the question of what I'm going to watch until it occurs to me that I feel like watching something. Then I turn to my memory of what I have, which is unfortunately always my first choice rather than to go to my computer and bring up the list I've actually catalogued, where I'm faced with dozens of pages of titles - black on white in Word - with no graphics to differentiate one from the other. The more you have, the worse it is. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has become so frustrated from hours of fruitless browsing that I've ended up wasting the time available for watching something and going to straight to bed - grumpy, beaten down, unentertained. 

So what can be done about this? Is there some way we might begin to recapture our rapture about the treasures we have squirrelled away? 

I think I've found the answer and it's surprisingly simple.

The secret is to pick our evening's entertainment earlier in the day and to spend that day looking forward to what we're going to see. Think about it: what this problem needs is the time to think about it. This has always been factored into the way we see movies in theaters. We have to pick a day and a time, we have to dress, to go out, and during those preliminary hours, that film is ours to dream about - to look forward, to imagine, to savor.

Your choice doesn't have to be extraordinarily careful or discerning; the plan will work whether it's a movie you already love or one you are simply curious to see. Find the disc, put it where you won't lose track of it, and think about it all day long. If it's something you've seen it before, reflect on the other times you've seen it and the pleasure it has given you. If it's something you haven't yet seen, Google it, look at production stills, read some reviews. Celebrate it. Value it. 

Turn your indecision into a hot date.



(c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

   
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Something Weird Video's BACKWOODS DOUBLE FEATURE Reviewed

October 9, 2017, 12:00 am
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Welcome to Something Weird Video Week here on Video WatchBlog! Since the passing of SWV founder Mike Vraney in January 2014, the company responsible for finding, restoring and releasing literally hundreds of once-lost exploitation films has continued under the direction of Mike's widow, artist Lisa Petrucci.  For the last few years, while maintaining the status quo at SWV, Lisa has guided the company into some fruitful new alliances, resulting in such exciting releases as Arrow Video's SHOCK AND GORE/HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS FEAST sets,  Film Movement's Joseph W. Sarno Retrospect Series releases (most recently ALL THE SINS OF SODOM/VIBRATIONS), and the recent AGFA Blu-ray release of THE ZODIAC KILLER (1971), while the company has continued on with business-as-usual.

Something Weird's back catalogue is so richly diverse that they often obscured some of their own releases back in the days when they were releasing new titles by the dozens. And now, focusing as people tend to do on what's new, it seems to me that there's a real danger of taking this abundance of rare product (more than 2,000 titles!) for granted. So I've decided to devote this week to a celebration of Mike & Lisa's great achievement. I'm going to go back and pick out a handful of interesting, worthwhile titles that were overlooked by VIDEO WATCHDOG's print coverage over the years - their Image Entertainment DVD titles as well as their own DVD-Rs/instant downloads. Everything I'm going to write about here over the next several days very much warrants rediscovery - and it's just a fraction of the bounty awaiting you over at www.somethingweird.com.

BACKWOODS DOUBLE FEATURE:
COMMON LAW WIFE, 1963, 76m
JENNIE: WIFE/CHILD, 1968, 82m
MOONSHINE LOVE, 1970, 61m
Something Weird/Image Entertainment, DVD $14.98

"Over 3 1/2 hours of Hillbilly Hokum!"

This 2003 DVD release from Something Weird Video / Image Entertainment is billed as a double feature but actually contains three films: Eric Sayers' COMMON LAW WIFE (1963, which contains the only footage from an unreleased early Larry Buchanan film); JENNIE, WIFE/CHILD (1968), directed by James Landis of THE SADIST and THE FLESH EATERS fame; and - hidden away in the extras - MOONSHINE LOVE (1969), a film by the unknown Lester Williams which is conspicuously more explicit than either of the two main features, and also went by such demure alternate titles as SOD SISTERS and HEAD FOR THE HILLS.

COMMON LAW WIFE is a little-known but classic example of a compromised feature film, reworked for commercial and exploitative purposes. It began as an early film by Texas-based maverick filmmaker Larry Buchanan (THE NAKED WITCH, MARS NEEDS WOMEN, GOODBYE NORMA JEAN) entitled SWAMP ROSE, which had starred the elderly George Edgely and middle-aged Anne MacAdams as Texas oil magnate Shugfoot Rainey and his live-in mistress Linda, whom the millionaire abruptly dumps in favor of New Orleans stripper Baby Doll, played by an attractive young lead named Lacey Kelly. This then compels Linda to assert her hold over Uncle Shug by legally confirming herself as his common law wife. The film had been shot in color back in 1960 but was never released.


The footage was acquired by producer-distributor Michael A. Ripps, best-remembered for acquiring a slimly-released independent item called BAYOU and transforming it into POOR WHITE TRASH, and later sexing-up Roger Corman's THE INTRUDER and pulling it into overdue profit by retitling it I HATE YOUR GUTS. Ripps hired local amateur filmmaker Eric Sayers to make Buchanan's film (apparently focused on the middle-aged angst angle) racier and more exploitable. He proceeded to reshoot large chunks of it - adding an incestuous angle (Baby Doll was now the oil baron's niece, one he sexually corrupted in her childhood), an affair with the town's local sheriff (he's married to Baby Doll's sister), a rape at the hands of a moonshiner, and more. Sayers had nothing of Buchanan's ability, so COMMON LAW WIFE "crosses the line" like crazy, and the old and new footage cuts back-and-forth with absolutely no sense of rhythm - but as an example of what can sometimes happen to a film to make it "more commercial," it's a fascinating diversion for cinephiles. You see, Sayers was able to retain the services of some erstwhile cast members like Anne MacAdams and George Edgely, but Lacey Kelly was no longer available for reshoots. Therefore, the all-important role of "Baby Doll" is played in the final cut, with Buchanan's color footage dumbed-down to grainy black-and-white, by two completely different women. Ms. Kelly's unnamed replacement is disguised in some early shots with sunglasses and a series of preposterous hats, but it's ultimately a fact impossible to cover up.



For all that, I must confess that this impossible-to-conceal fact did nevertheless get by me; while the shots of Baby Doll flouncing around in obvious disguise did seem suspicious, I never cottoned to the fact that the film actually had the gall to present me with two different Baby Dolls in tight facial closeup till I listened to Buchanan's audio commentary, moderated by Nathaniel Thompson. Once I did notice, it was obvious - and I have little doubt that drive-in audiences never caught on. At any rate, someone ought to double-bill this one with Buñuel's THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE someday.


Though I'm unaware of any tales of post-production woe having been passed down to us about James Landis' JENNIE, WIFE/CHILD, it carries some tell-tale markings of a director losing control of his project. Furthermore, the IMDb tells us that two different directors were involved and that neither of them is credited; the other being Robert Carl Cohen - listed only as being "in charge of production." Made in 1968, and therefore more generous in terms of nudity than its companion feature, it's a sometimes startlingly well-made picture, a kind of hillbilly retelling of Cain's THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. Middle-aged Albert Peckingpaw (Jack Lester) owns a farm and is married to the much-younger Jennie (Beverly Lundsford), who finds herself stifling from loneliness in the domestic cage her husband has made for her. She becomes attracted to the farmhand, the unlikely-named Mario Dingle (Jack Leader), who's stupid but smitten and tender toward her, and lust leads them to commit acts that draw her husband's ire and compel them to still worse acts.  As with Landis' earlier film, the cult favorite THE SADIST (1965), JENNIE: WIFE/CHILD was photographed in black-and-white by Hungarian immigrant Vilmos Zsigmond, who went on to become one of the most justly celebrated cameramen in the world (DELIVERANCE, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, BLOW OUT, THE DEER HUNTER) so it looks gorgeous throughout, and it also features a score by Davie Allen and the Arrows (THE WILD ANGELS) as well as their surprise on-screen participation. What is odd about the film as it finally stands is that much of the score feels ill-suited to the American Gothic film Landis made, and the dramatic moods he painstakingly creates are abruptly cut-off with ironic intertitle cards that cast the overall picture into a bizarre Brechtian tense, underscoring the distance between the viewer and the unfolding tragedy. I liked what I saw, but I strongly suspect there is a behind-the-scenes story here, waiting to be told, and a much better film that never saw the light of day. Visually, the film belongs very much in the same category as BABY DOLL and SPIDER BABY:









The bonus third feature in the set, Lester Williams' MOONSHINE LOVE, is a fairly amateurish film that opens with a credit sequence emphasizing its professionalism with an array of behind-the-scenes production shots. It's about a bank heist (staged in a Woolworth's parking lot, no less) that goes awry, leaving the mastermind high and dry while one of the two hired perpetrators (Tim E. Lane) - the one in possession of the stolen money - not only loses it but also his memory when he takes a tumble from the escaping vehicle. He is saved by a couple of mountain women (one of them speaks with a pronounced German accent, without explanation) who live with their moonshining father in the woods, in incestuous abandon. One of the moonshiner's daughters (Lil, played by "Breedge McCoy") speaks with a pronounced German accent, for no more apparent reason than she was agreeable to doing nudity and being manhandled. Neither of the daughters are what you'd call pretty, but Genie Palmer, the probably pseudonymous actress who plays Jeannie, gifts the production with some surprisingly candid eroticism in a scene where, without a hint of self-consciousness or performing to camera, she treats a carrot as a sex toy - and really seems in intimate communication with it. She also has an extended love-making scene with Lane that, while technically softcore, conjures real heat and seems no less than genuine.



This "Backwoods" release is almost 14 years old now, but the disc was very well-mastered and, aside from some unavoidable scratches and splices, the picture quality upscales extremely well on Blu-ray players. (Larry Buchanan is clearly impressed by what he sees in the course of his commentary.) The other extras are limited to an amusing extended trailer for COMMON LAW WIFE that follows the example of Hitchcock's trailer for PSYCHO, with an unnamed announcer telling us about this film - too shocking for him to show any scenes from the actual picture - while standing in a sleazy motel room of the sort wherein, he tells us, the film opens. (The film does no such thing, opening in a New Orleans strip club.) There's also a "gallery of roadshow exploitation art with audio oddities," about eight minutes in length, and this is also a rare release that rewards reading the chapter titles with a few laughs - even before you watch the movies.

Lisa Petrucci of Something Weird Video has asked me to pass along the following info: While the Something Weird website remains available for your perusal, it is presently not possible for place an order directly from it. For the present, the ONLY way people can order from SWV is to send payment by PayPal to somethingweirdauctions@gmail.com with an order and their address, or the old-school way of sending a check or money order to SWV, PO Box 33664, Seattle WA 98133.

(c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.


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Joe Sarno's THE WALL OF FLESH reviewed

October 10, 2017, 12:00 am
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THE WALL OF FLESH
1968, Something Weird Video
88 minutes
$10 DVD-R, $9.99 download

The last of three features filmed back-to-back in the New York City loft apartment of Morris Kaplan (the others were ALL THE SINS OF SODOM and VIBRATIONS - now available in a 2K Blu-ray DVD set from Film Movement),  THE WALL OF FLESH is still more of a minimalist production, one that harkens back to earlier Sarno films such as SIN IN THE SUBURBS (1964, VW 24:23) and RED ROSES OF PASSION (1966, VW 85:15) in that it concerns repressed individuals who join cults, giving themselves over to a collective mentality, as a means of unblocking themselves sexually. 

The film begins almost mid-sentence as married couple Art (Dan Machuen) and Vera Coleman (Maria Lease) are enjoying a post-meal conversation with Vera's office co-worker Nancy Horner (Nina Forster, uncredited) and her sister Lauri (Lita Coleman), an "aspiring" anthropologist recently returned from South America, where she studied the living and mating habits of a primitive native tribe. When she mentions that some of the natives' sexual problems could only be cured by group rituals, Art responds with interest while Vera seems repelled - a response that makes more sense after the guests' departure, when Vera is shown responding coldly and without pleasure to her husband's attempts at lovemaking. Her problem is somehow rooted in her resentment of Art's decision to stay at home to pursue a writing career (for which she secretly doesn't believe he has any talent), while she has been forced into the workaday world to support him.


Maria Lease and Dan Machuen.
In a flurry of appropriately claustrophobic scenes that alternate between only three small, cramped rooms - and which could well be fewer with minor redressing (Art and Vera's living room and bedroom, and the bedroom of the single-room apartment shared by the two sisters) - Vera quickly reaches the point where she can no longer bear Art's touch, even when she guiltily invites it; Nancy - a recovering nymphomaniac who's had to change her ways after a rough illegal abortion - becomes obsessed with Art; and the bisexual Lauri betrays her sister's interest by making a play for Art herself, which he more readily accepts. Lauri also becomes a confidante of Vera, whom she directs to the private therapy sessions of her former lover Jennifer Taggart (Cherie Winters), which turn out to be group sex sessions that addict those participating, not only to group intimacy but also to Jennifer's own dominant persona. Lauri's introductory presence at Vera's early sessions prevents her from making her own intended departure from the city, a knowing gesture of self-sacrifice that sucks her back into a lifestyle and romance she had deliberately fled as far as the jungles of South America.

This film was assembled with conspicuously lesser means than its predecessors. As mentioned, the sets are severely limited, so much so that Lauri has to be shown working on her anthropology thesis in windy public places; when she goes to enter Vera in Jennifer's classes, there is no waiting room set, so she is shown leaning against a wall and reading a magazine in tight close-up, a composition into which Jennifer somehow enters. It frankly doesn't sound like it would work, but the characters and the drama of their situations holds the viewer and the story flows without disruption. Sarno's script, though hampered by the scenic limitations imposed, is innovative for the ways it surprises the familiar viewer's expectations. The outsider here (Lauri) is atypical of such figures in his other work; though she does interfere in a marriage, the sensitive Art's strength of character (a particularly well-played facet of Machuen's performance) doesn't permit her to seduce him until Vera is, to some degree, already lost to him. Lauri doesn't cause the usual divisiveness and destruction common to Sarno's intruder characters but rather sacrifices herself, in order to guide other people, about whom she cares, to a place where they find themselves more fulfilled.

Dan Machuen and Marianne Prevost.
Also remarkable about THE WALL OF FLESH is that Sarno opts not to take any editorial position on the interpersonal dynamics taking place, a problem he subverts by introducing the Colemans' marriage as troubled from the beginning, and by having Art - an unusual Sarno male, in that he's more sensitive than most of the women - repeatedly voice his feeling that he would rather lose Vera than have her live out her life with him unhappily. Sarno typically avoids passing any kind of judgement on his characters as their story is in progress, leaving the viewer as involved in their process as the characters themselves, and reserves any glimpse of judgment for those points where his stories end. This often leads to more conservative conclusions than the bold subject matter or the intensity with which it's pursued might lead us to expect; in this case, however, the film concludes as suddenly and abruptly as it begins, leaving the characters' respective quests for happiness not only ongoing, but, for the viewer, an open question. This seems to me a breakthrough in American erotic cinema, asserting the film's stake in matters of philosophy as well as the sexual, its execution favoring both over the merely erotic.

It should be mentioned in this context that THE WALL OF FLESH was possibly the first of Sarno's American films to break through certain earlier boundaries; there is more oral-erotic contact (not oral-genital) between the actors, pubic hair is shown, and two of the female characters are shown pleasuring themselves (as in the Swedish-made INGA), though not explicitly. The introduction of masturbation as a topic, and the dramatization of women taking responsibility for their own pleasure and fulfillment, would continue in Sarno's imminent series of "vibrator" films, which began with VIBRATIONS but would become more focused in his Florida-made films ODD TRIANGLE and THE LAYOUT [reviewed VW 91:10].

Something Weird's DVD-R presents the film in full frame 1.33:1 with a bold mono track. (The slight widening of the image seen in my video grabs are an aberration of VLC and do not reflect the actual look of the disc.) The feature is accompanied by a theatrical trailer that includes a glimpse of an uncharacteristically joyous sexual encounter between the Colemans that, curiously, does not appear in SWV's print but is mentioned by Art to Lauri as a positive initial result of Vera's therapy. Whether it was cut prior to release or simply missing from this rare surviving print is not presently known.

As mentioned previously, the Something Weird Video website can be found at www.somethingweird.com, which will guide you to this and any number of other wonderful and strange purchases. However, it's not presently possible for them to accept orders there. To order, send payment by PayPal to somethingweirdauctions@gmail.com with an order and your address, or send a check or money order to SWV, PO Box 33664, Seattle WA 98133 - old school!

(c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.


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BLAZING SAND reviewed

October 11, 2017, 12:00 am
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BLAZING SAND
Brennender Sand
1960, Something Weird Video
85m 40s, $10 DVD-R, $9.99 download

At first glance, this dubbed desert adventure might not look too different than any other arid jeeps-and-camels eyesore you might have found playing in a 3:00am slot on one of your local television stations back in the early 1970s. However, there is real historical significance here: directed by Raphael Nussbaum, BLAZING SAND was the first post-war co-production between West Germany and Israel. Think of that: less than fifteen years after the Holocaust, these countries had found a way to move beyond their horrible shared past and embark on hopes toward a more fortunate shared future. Yet, with the passing of time, it has come to be remembered primarily as the acting debut of Daliah Lavi - credited onscreen as "Daliah Lawie."

She plays Dina, a snobbish arrogant Israeli beauty who dances in a nightclub frequented by her "theatrical" friends, four of whom - including her boyfriend, Marco - recently crossed the desert into forbidden, heavily guarded Jordan, where they went to the ancient city of Citra intending to loot an ancient crypt of its fabled scrolls, the originals of actual Biblical texts in the hand of King Solomon. When only one of the men returns, empty-handed, he is shot on sight by Israeli border guards and dies in hospital - but not before telling Dima that Marco is alive and that the scrolls she was hoping would fund their getaway to a better life are in his possession. Dina resolves to mount a rescue mission and approaches Saddik, a slick would-be playboy type of means, and manages to seduce him into financing the expedition without really giving him anything other than empty promises in return. She also turns the charm on local war hero David Rodin (Abraham Eisenberg, a kind of junior league Brad Harris), whose heart belongs to the earnest farm girl Hannah (Gila Almagor); he rejects Dina but accepts her invitation to lead the group, which is filled out by Saddik, a klutzy college boy named Mike (at one point, he tries to start a campfire by rubbing two sticks together when there is a blazing torch right beside him), and Julius (Gert Gunther Hoffmann), the local school's professor of archaeology. They form quite a motley group and comparisons to Doc Savage's "Fabulous Five" would not be far amiss. Posing as a Bedoin caravan, with Dina riding a donkey and cradling a blanketed doll, they manage to reach their destination - "All Shots Have Been Taken On the Original Scene of Action" the credits tell us - but the trouble is in getting out.

For a film with such a weighty historical distinction, and a storyline encompassing so much struggle and tragedy, the overall feeling it projects is surprisingly whimsical, and the dubbing lends a comic dimension that one can't be sure was always present in the original. (While investigating the interior of Cintra's Temple of the High Priests, with everyone examining solid walls for possible secret passages, the torch-bearing Julius suddenly finds a huge hole in one wall and cries "I think I've found the entrance!" Also, Dina is variously addressed during the film as Tina, Nina and even Lina!) In some ways the real storyline is Dina's character arc from a cynical, superior, manipulative person to someone willing to take the ultimate responsibility for others and a common cause. 

Making her debut at age 20, Lavi is somewhat more full-figured here than the lean, lithe-figured star she soon became, and she's made to wear a procession of unflattering outfits, even a singularly ugly bikini. Statuesque and sultry she may be, but she doesn't quite have a firm grip on acting yet - she has a hard time making eye contact with her co-stars - but, especially once the action moves from the general kibbutz setting to the desert, we can see her gaining ease and even some command in relation to the camera.

Considering how lightweight the film really is, it builds to a surprisingly solemn pay-off that philosophizes that maybe  people, like things, belong where God has put them. Though made at a time well before the downbeat endings that would gain favor in Britain and America by the end of the decade, it leaves us with many more characters dead than alive. In its tragic closing shots, BLAZING SAND seems to propose that life is a dangerous game and that mere survival is nothing to sneeze at.
 
This film is an important reminder that Something Weird Video's eye for the oddities of cinema is all-embracing and not strictly limited to grindhouse fare. BLAZING SANDS is not a great film and doesn't clearly adhere to any proper genre that we recognize here; however, it is an international co-production of some historical note, and marks the arrival of an important new star. While the presentation here is hardly definitive, it serves as a valuable bookmark that could well encourage a more definitive restoration someday.

You can order BLAZING SAND or any other Something Weird release from PayPal by addressing your order information and payment to somethingweirdauctions@gmail.com, or by addressing a check or money order directly to SWV, PO Box 33664, Seattle WA 98133.


(c) 2017 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
 

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