Film Diary: RE-ANIMATOR (Stuart Gordon, 1985)

‘I gave him life!’

There’s no doubt that Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) has become an iconic horror film. An immensely effective black comedy that is anchored by a wonderful performance from Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West (to which Bruce Abbott is required to perform as straight man Dan Cain, who assists West in his… necromantic adventures), in hindsight Gordon’s film seems to owe as much to vaudeville comedy double acts (if Dan Cain is Bud Abbott, Herbert West is Lou Costello) as it does to the horror genre.

There’s a hint of inter-generational conflict, the young and up-and-coming West, a student of the prestigious Dr Hans Gruber in Switzerland, being set against the prideful Dr Carl Hill (a marvelously perverse performance by David Gale). Hill is the funding magnet for Miskatonic University, and has a Nietzschean obsession with the will and its location in the brain; in the R-rated cut (which excises some of the film’s more outrageous mayhem and adds some expositional scenes that were omitted from Gordon’s preferred, unrated, cut), this obsession manifests itself in Hill’s well-practised ability to control the will of others through hypnosis. Meanwhile, Cain is trying to curry favour with Carl Halsey (Robert Sampson), the Dean of Miskatonic University and the father of Cain’s lover Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton).

It seems that the intention was for Cain to be the film’s protagonist, and although Cain is perhaps the film’s most morally well-intentioned character, as in all vaudeville pairings the ‘straight man’ often seems more than a little ‘flat’; most viewers probably work their way into the narrative through West. West is quite clearly looney-tunes (the R-rated version also adds a scene in which Cain finds West injecting himself with the reagent, with the ferocity of a true junkie), but thanks to the exuberance of Combs’ performance, it’s difficult not to sympathise with him. West is a truly revolutionary figure, like a Bakhtinian clown whose appearance is distruptive to hierarchies and models of authority. Early in the film, he is shown disrupting a lecture given by Dr Hill through the snapping of pencils. (This results in Hill admonishing West, telling him – in a line delivered wonderfully by David Gale – ‘Mr West, I suggest you get yourself a pen’.) In the film’s climax, West assembles a horde of reanimated corpses, all given to enacting their own will, who threaten to tear down the establishment (in a metaphorical sense, if not in a literal one), after Hill’s sexual obsession with Megan comes to a head (geddit?) in a scene that, in the post #metoo world, seems even more deliberately cringey than it was during the Eighties.

Megan is a more mercurial character. When West first approaches Cain, asking to rent a room in Cain’s house, Meg suggests Cain turn him down; out of economic necessity, Cain accepts West’s proposition, however. Meg’s instinctive doubts about West are, the narrative proves, well-founded: West, it seems, kills Cain’s beloved pet cat so that West may test his reagent on it, then kill it once again when it comes back to life; and West is also responsible for alienating Cain from Dean Halsey’s affections, leading Cain into disrepute through his association with West’s activities. However, on the other hand Meg is also given to manipulating Cain’s will through a combination of histrionics, nagging and sex.

In retrospect, Re-Animator is a film about the revolution and the carnival, will and desire, the self and the institution. Some of its boundless energy was captured in Gordon’s next Lovecraft adaptation, From Beyond (1986). Back in 2016, I wrote a lengthy review of the Arrow Video release of Brian Yuzna’s sequel, Bride of Re-Animator (1990), which can be found here.

Viewing Notes. This viewing was via the ‘integral’ cut of the film (running 104:55 mins) on the German Capelight Blu-ray release. The Blu-ray set also includes the unrated and R-rated edits of Re-Animator. The ‘integral’ cut uses the unrated cut as its base and inserts into this the expositional footage unique to the R-rated cut.

This was my first time watching the ‘integral’ cut of Re-Animator. Having first seen the film in about 1990 via the UK VHS release, which contained a heavily BBFC-censored version of the unrated cut, I didn’t see the scenes exclusive to the R-rated edit until I managed to get hold of the Elite Entertainment 10th Anniversary LaserDisc release in the mid/late 1990s. Seen in isolation, as they are presented on that old LaserDisc release, the scenes unique to the R-rated cut ‘work’ in their own ways, and at least one of them (the scene in which Cain finds West self-administering the reagent in order, ostensibly, to keep himself awake) should arguably have been included in the unrated cut. However, in truth the ‘integral’ cut drags owing to the inclusion of the scenes of Dr Hill hypnotising various personages; part of the appeal of the unrated cut is its almost breathless pace.

The Capelight Blu-ray presentation is very good, easily eclipsing the old US Blu-ray release from Image Entertainment. I have not yet seen the Arrow Video Blu-ray released in the States, so cannot comment on how the Capelight release compares with that presentation of the film.

2020-7

Film Diary: LA VERITE (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960)

‘Is she on trial for promiscuity or murder?’

Essentially a courtroom drama with extended flashbacks, La verite was the penultimate film of the great French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (if one discounts Clouzot’s unfinished L’enfer). Sadly, Clouzot’s approach to filmmaking was eclipsed in the early 1960s by the filmmakers of the nouvelle vague, who had dismissed Clouzot’s approach as an example of the cinema de papa (fuddy-duddy cinema); already, by the time of the production of La verite, Clouzot’s measured style seemed in stark contrast to the immediacy of films such as Godard’s A bout de souffle and Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups.

In this context, La verite seems like an attempt to channel the inter-generational conflict within the filmmaking world. Dominique (Brigitte Bardot Bardot) is put on trial for the murder of her lover, Gilbert (Sami Frey, in a role that nearly went to Trintignant or Belmondo, among others). Most of the film takes place in a courtroom, where Dominique and others give evidence either for or against the allegation that she killed Gilbert; these witness statements are presented via extended flashbacks, each of which is like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle – and each of which casts the relationship between Dominique and Gilbert in a slightly different light. The overall effect is not dissimilar to Rashomon: which of these versions of events captures the ‘truth’ (la verite)?

The trial is presided over by middle-aged men who struggle to sympathise with Dominique. Clouzot takes pains to show the selecting of the jury, an all-male group who come to the trial with their own prejudices. At the start of the trial, one of the jury members asserts that Dominique is a ‘bitch’ who will ‘get away with it’. In the flashbacks, we see the flighty Dominique falling in love with Gilbert, an uptight and earnest music student. However, as the story progresses we come to see Gilbert as manipulative and borderline abusive. Dominique and Gilbert are eternally incompatible, and the older generation struggle to understand their tribulations – especially those of Dominique.

Bardot excels in her role, which was written for her following her rise to stardom in the late 1950s. Behind the scenes, events were just as traumatic as those in the story, paralleling the production of another film produced in 1960, John Huston’s The Misfits. Whilst La verite was being made, Clouzot’s wife Vera, who had co-written La verite, suffered a mental breakdown, and would die of a heart attack shortly after production was completed. Bardot’s husband Jacques Charrier also experienced a breakdown, when he discovered that Bardot was conducting an affair with her co-star Sami Frey. Charrier attempted suicide, and following a dispute with Charrier, Bardot attempted suicide also.

Viewing Notes. The Criterion Blu-ray release contains a superb presentation of the film, in its original aspect ratio of 1.66:1. The 35mm monochrome photography is captured excellently on the disc, with defined midtones and balanced highlights and shadows. The French dialogue is presented via a lossless track and accompanied by optional English subtitles.

2020-6

Film Diary: LA NUIT DE LA MORT! / NIGHT OF DEATH! (Raphael Delpard, 1980)

‘What do you think could go on in a place like this?’

A French gore film with more than a passing resemblance to Jean Rollin’s early 1980s work – though given Rollin’s standing as one of the few French horror/gore filmmakers of the mid-20th Century, this comparison is admittedly difficult to avoid – Raphael Delpard’s La nuit de la mort! (Night of Death!) reworks Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘eat the rich’ into ‘eat the young’. When reserved, respectful Martine (Isabelle Goguey) takes a job in a retirement home, she is coached by brash Nicole (Charlotte De Turckheim). Initially, she is told that the clients’ good health is owing to a strict vegetarian diet, but as the story progresses Martine comes to realise that her elderly charges are consuming something much less traditional (ie, the internal organs of young women), resulting in an artificially elongated lifespan.

Like Rollin’s David Cronenberg-esque La nuit des traquees (Night of the Hunted, also 1980), La nuit de la mort! focuses on an institution which, behind its respectable facade, facilitates all sorts of debauchery. The film’s depiction of cannibalism situates it on a sliding scale of movies that deal with the theme of anthropophagy – from the cannibalism-as-savagery motif of the Italian cannibal movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s (eg, Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox, 1981) to the satirical depiction of cannibalism at the heart of institutions such as family life in Bob Balaban’s Parents (1989). Here, in Delpard’s picture, the devouring of human flesh is used not just as a metaphor for inter-generational conflict but is also depicted as a form of vampirism; its ritualistic consumption is a source of rejuvenation and, possibly, eternal life. In the film’s focus on elderly inhabitants of a retirement home that consume the young proletarian women who work there, La nuit de la mort! owes more than a smidgen to the Countess Bathory legend.

La nuit de la mort! contains a particularly memorable scene of evisceration in which a naked Nicole is butchered by the elderly patients in her care. A remarkably authentic-looking dummy torso is cut open and real offal removed from it. It’s a potent, gruesome scene that anticipates, later in the film, Martine’s discovery of her friend’s butchered corpse in a wardrobe.

Apparently, though she’s very good here, Goguey was never comfortable acting on screen and preferred to work behind the camera: Goguey acted as an assistant director for Claude Pierson, in the era of Pierson’s transition from softcore to hardcore sex pictures.

Viewing Notes. The Synapse DVD release runs for 94:17 mins and is presented in 1.66:1, with anamorphic enhancement. The 35mm-shot feature looks very good. The French soundtrack is accompanied by optional English subtitles.

2020-5

Film Diary: COMBAT SHOCK (Buddy Giovinazzo, 1980)

‘It all looks the same. I can’t tell one place from another [….] I can no longer tell where one torture ends and the next begins’.

Marrying the disturbed-Vietnam-veteran premise of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) with the oddball depiction of domestic pressures of David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), Buddy Giovinazzo’s Combat Shock begins with some unconvincing footage of the Vietnam war and soon journeys to America. Once back home, Frankie – alienated from his father after being declared MIA in Vietnam – struggles with crime, poverty, his nagging wife and their mutated baby which cries incessantly. (The baby’s horrifying appearance is, we are told, a product of Frankie’s exposure to chemical weapons during his time in Vietnam.)

Where the ‘Nam-set opening is unconvincing, looking for all the world like it was shot in woodland or a park (which, no doubt, was the case), the film’s street scenes have a cinema verite-style authenticity to them. We see people hustling and struggling to get by, lining up at a soup kitchen, and seeking escape through drugs. Every relationship in the film is based on exploitation and manipulation: friends exploit friends; lovers exploit lovers. Frankie’s wife nags him incessantly; Frankie reaches out to his estranged father, with the aim of acquiring some financial help, only to find that his father has lost his business and is now in a nursing home.

The film continually crosscuts Frankie’s experiences in Vietnam with his life after returning home – not just to suggest that Frankie is ‘haunted’ by his experiences in the combat zone, but seemingly to establish an equivalence between his torture there, at the hands of a defined and identifiable enemy, and the more covert and socially-acceptable abuse he suffers at home. ‘I go back every day, dad’, Frankie tells his father. The film’s final sequences have an apocalyptic finality to them, which consolidates the film’s depiction of contemporary America as a form of Purgatory.

Viewing Notes. The Arrow Video UK DVD release contains both the shorter Combat Shock cut (running a little under 92 mins) and the longer ‘director’s cut’, titled American Nightmare (running 96:52 mins). The 16mm-shot film is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1. A second disc containing numerous extra features is included in the package.

2020-4

Film Diary: THE TOXIC AVENGER, PART III: THE LAST TEMPTATION OF TOXIE (Michael Herz & Lloyd Kaufman, 1989)

‘All these things I will give thee, if thou will fall down and work for me’.

As a film reputedly made from the ‘fag ends’ of the production of The Toxic Avenger, Part II (Michael Herz & Lloyd Kaufman, 1989), The Last Temptation of Toxie is remarkably coherent. The film’s narrative – in which Toxie ‘breaks bad’ by agreeing to work for Apocalypse, Inc in order to acquire the $357,000 to fund the experimental surgery needed to restore his fiancee Claire’s sight – is essentially a story about ‘selling out’. The ‘local’ (Tromaville’s small town mentality) is pitted against the ‘global’ (the evil corporation Apocalypse, Inc). This is established in the film’s opening sequence, which acts as a metonym for the broader conflicts suggested in the narrative. In this sequence, which arguably sets a bar in terms of onscreen action that the rest of the film struggles to achieve, a group of hoodlums enter Tromaville’s video store, the walls of which are plastered with posters for Troma movies, and tell the patrons that now Tromaville is ‘a company town, you’re all gonna rent company tapes’. Various Hollyweird studios are namechecked (Disney, Warner, Paramount) in a manner with overtly negative connotations. The patrons, including a girl in a bikini who writhes erotically throughout, assert that they like variety. (Hollyweird product, by implication, does not offer this.) Into this strides Toxie, who defends the patrons against the corporate hoodlums in excessively gruesome, wonderfully comic ways, defending the notion of variety and choice in cinema against Hollyweird’s homogenising ways. (Given how the superhero film has evolved since Toxie’s heyday, we could certainly benefit from a Toxic Avenger wandering into current cinematic trends and smashing up the corporate hoodlums.)

The film is as ‘meta’ as, say, RoboCop 2 (Irvin Kershner, 1989) – a sequel which narrativises the process of making a corporate beancounter-pleasing sequel through the building of ‘RoboCop 2’, a robot designed by the evil corporation (OCP) to better the original RoboCop but which ends up being utterly compromised because they (OCP) cannot capture the essential humanity of the original (RoboCop, the cyborg/RoboCop, the movie). The Last Temptation of Toxie‘s opening sequence establishes a contrast between Tromaville (independent cinema) and Apocalypse, Inc (Hollyweird product), establishing a theme which the rest of the film pursues relentlessly (through Toxie’s ‘selling out’ to the corporation).

Along the way, there are some wonderful asides (a member of Apocalypse, Inc who channels Robert De Niro’s performance as Louis Cyphre in Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, 1987) and Phoebe Legere’s energetic and unashamed performance as Toxie’s lady love, Claire. It’s a funny picture, barbed in its anti-corporate sentiments; the bad rep it has achieved is arguably undeserved: whilst not on par with the first Toxic Avenger (Herz & Kaufman, 1984) or Citizen Toxie (Kaufman, 2000), it is easily the equal of The Toxic Avenger, Part II.

Viewing Notes. The 88 Films Blu-ray release runs for 101:49 minutes and appears to be a cut prepared for an ‘R’ rating in the US. This edit of the film omits some of the more gruesome violence – notably some of the acts Toxie commits against the hoodlums in the film’s video store-set opening sequence. The presentation is adequate though parts of it are in more rough shape than others, with some noticeable damage here and there (including vertical scratches). It would seem that the source is a positive element – perhaps an interpositive or even a print. Audio is presented via a LPCM 2.0 stereo track, which is functional.

2020-3

Film Diary: LA LAMA NEL CORPO / THE MURDER CLINIC (Elio Scardamaglia, 1966)

‘It must be very exciting to make love with a murderer’.

Set in the 1870s, Scardamaglia’s La lama nel corpo is a typical mid-1960s Gothic giallo all italiana. The picture features William Berger as Dr Robert Vance, the head of a psychiatric clinic based in a decaying mansion. This Gothic setting forms the locus for a series of murders, of Vance’s patients. Who could the killer be? Fred, a male patient who exhibits violent psychotic breaks with reality? Dr Vance himself, who is claimed to have murdered his wife’s beautiful sister? And what is the source of the strange noises emanating from an upstairs room?

Into this mayhem comes Gisele (Francoise Prevost), who after an incident involving the horse-drawn carriage she is travelling in, is rescued by Vance and taken to the clinic in order to recuperate. Prevost is a wonderful female lead – mature, resourceful and beautiful – and far from the pathetic woman-in-peril of most Gothic fiction of the era (for example, the Roger Corman Edgar Allan Poe adaptations). She enriches the film, the screen lighting up when she appears, and gives the film a touch of class. Berger, sadly, is quite limp and unmemorable in his role.

La lama nel corpo is a film of many red herrings; its plotting suggests the influence of Mario Bava’s Sei donne per l’assassino (Blood and Black Lace, 1964). Some aspects of the story – such as Prevost wandering at night through the huge corridors of the clinic in search of the source of the mysterious sound she has heard from her room – make one wonder whether Dario Argento took some ideas from La lama nel corpo when making Suspiria (1977). Regardless of the fairly non-distinctive narrative, the film’s setting adds much to the picture, the production design creating a strong sense of atmosphere that is amplified by the predominantly low-key photography. Throughout, there is much staging-in-depth using the full horizontal axis of the ‘scope frame, with action taking place in both the foreground and background of the compositions.

Viewing Notes. La lama nel corpo has been difficult to see in a reasonable presentation. The FilmArt Blu-ray released in Germany contains an adequate presentation of the film, in the film’s original ‘scope aspect ratio and seeming to be uncut (running for 86:59 mins), though one that seems to be sourced from a print in rough shape. (The disc includes both a ‘restored’ presentation in which some of the damage of the source has been remedied, and an ‘unrestored’ presentation which exhibits plentiful damage – burn marks, scratches, etc.) The drop into the toe is sharp, with shadow detail often seeming ‘crushed’, and sometimes the rise into the shoulder is equally bold: skintones sometimes bloom.

The disc offers Italian, German and English audio options (all lossless), with optional German subtitles only.

2020-2