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: 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