Category: Reviews

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The Iron Rose

The Iron Rose is the rare Jean Rollin movie that misses its mark, and I say this as a fan of his work. There are elements of an interesting movie here, but it’s way too slow. I don’t mind films with a leisurely build-up, but you can skip the first twenty minutes of this and not miss anything.

The Iron Rose follows the trials of a pair of adult lovers, labeled The Boy and The Girl. The Boy returns for a wedding, where he reads a bad poem to a room full of drunk people. For whatever reason, The Girl is impressed by the Boy’s literary efforts. They make a date to go bike riding and end up frolicking in the railroad station amongst the trains, he play-chasing her. Foreshadowing!

Afterwards, our lovers go on a bike ride and stop at the local cemetery, which is huge. One of this movie’s neat touches is that the tombs are better cared for than the city’s buildings, which are falling apart. After walking the grounds, they clamber into an underground tomb to rut. Cut to a clown entering the graveyard and leaving flowers. The Iron Rose’s symbolism isn’t exactly subtle, hitting you over the head like a sledgehammer. By the time The Boy and The Girl are done with sexy-time night has fallen and they can’t find their way out of the cemetery. And that’s your plot.

As someone who got lost once as a kid, I can tell you it’s no fun. Still, these are adults we are talking about and it’s only a graveyard. That’s the point. There is nothing there, just the lovers and a bunch of headstones and tombs. The dead don’t rise, but tempers sure do. Soon The Boy and The Girl are acting like frightened children.

The Iron Rose has an interesting premise, but it takes too long for anything to happen. That’s because Mr. Rollin has made an 85-minute movie out of 40-minutes of material. The acting is so-so and there are way too many close-ups of the characters’ faces. We also have a scene at the beach that will be familiar to watchers of Mr. Rollin’s movies, as that same stretch of beach shows up in many of his films. It’s his version of Roger Corman’s burning chicken coop.

The best thing about The Iron Rose is the setting, an enormous unkempt cemetery that feels like a city of the dead. Lest fans of Mr. Rollin worry that he’s turning into a highbrow indy director, this movie contains lots of sex and tasteless nudity. Unfortunately Mr. Rollin might not be the right person to handle this kind of material. He is a wonderful director, but he’s not subtle, and psychological nuance isn’t his thing. An interesting failure, The Iron Rose is for Jean Rollin fans only.

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Gurozuka

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xvf1qhAHGp4

I watched Gurozuka on my brand new Fandor subscription. Fandor has an interesting collection of horror films, many of which I’ve never seen before, and I’m hoping I’ll like their offerings better than I liked Gurozuka. This is the first Japanese slasher flick I have ever seen and it features a few wrinkles on the slasher trope. All the characters are female and the movie contains no sexual element or even subtext.

A newly reformed high school film club returns to the cabin in the woods where the previous high school film club made a movie named Gurozuka. One student died during the making of this film and another was institutionalized. The grainy footage – recovered by Maki, the head of the film club – is spooky, featuring a Noh-mask wearing figure wielding a meat cleaver.

There are seven girls, six students and their teacher. The trouble starts when Natsuki –queen bee and aspiring model – quits the production when she learns that Maki and Ai – who organized this little jaunt in the woods – are planning on making a horror movie. Natsuki isn’t nice about quitting, but you can’t blame her for feeling misled. After that, the bad mojo comes fast: stolen food, poison mushrooms and a Noh-mask wearing killer with a meat cleaver. One similarity Gurozuka shares with American slasher flicks is its brain-dead characters, as the girls are too busy bickering and sniping to notice the killer in their midst.

I cannot say I liked Gurozuka. I didn’t guess the identity of the killer, but on the other hand I didn’t care about the identity of the killer. The idea that the student film is cursed, filling whoever watches it with the urge to kill and perhaps reenact the events of the movie, is an interesting idea that is never fully explored. Too bad.

Here are a few things I liked about Gurozuka: the Noh mask killer was freaky. A few scenes scared me, and the video footage was effective. I think my problem with this movie has to do with the fact that I didn’t like any of the characters. I’m not crazy about movies whose main attraction is rooting for all the annoying people to die. Gurozuka doesn’t even get that right, as most of the deaths occur off-screen. The Final Girl twist at the end is intriguing, but not enough to save this movie.

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Videodrome

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Videodrome isn’t my favorite Dave Cronenberg movie – that would be Rabid, warts and all – but it is one of his best. This is a film that predicted the rise of easily accessible pornography and the packaging of sex & violence (really sexual violence) as mainstream entertainment. Mr. Cronenberg missed the advent of the Internet, but everything else about Videodrome is spot-on.

Max (James Woods) runs CIVIC-TV, a cable TV channel. Most of his programming is sex and violence, and he is always on the lookout for new talent. When Max’s tech guy intercepts a cable transmission that consists of hardcore S&M he’s intrigued. All he has to go on is a name: Videodrome.

Max meets Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry) on a talk show, where he tells the world he’s doing it a favor by giving people a harmless outlet for their fantasies. Max and Nicki are made for each other. She’s into piercing and he has sadistic tendencies. Their sex scenes are more hair-raising than the special effects which come later; I’m amazed Videodrome got an R-rating, but this was the early 80’s.

Max soon starts seeing things. That’s because watching Videodrome gives you brain tumors. Unphased, he follows a trail that leads to the Cathode Ray Mission, founded by Brian O’Blivion. Mr. O’Blivion is dead, but he’s recorded hundreds of hours of videotape of himself so he’s still around, a sadomasochistic Casper the Friendly Ghost. His daughter is now running the shop. Videodrome and the Cathode Ray Mission are at war, and Max – whose hallucinations grow steadily worse as Cronenberg’s bizarre skin fetish rears its head – is stuck in the middle.

Videodrome was way ahead of its time. My only quibble is that a few of the special effects are cheesy and don’t do this movie justice. James Woods does a great job playing Max, a sleazy operator and pornographer who samples his own wares. Max isn’t nice, but here’s a dirty little secret: lots of times people aren’t nice. In a way having an unlikable hero makes Videodrome easier to watch, as Max loses his agency and becomes a meat package ripe for programming, deprogramming and reprogramming, a victim of the boob tube.

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Blood and Black Lace

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UMNNQqurwc

Watching Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace reminded me of an episode of Charlie’s Angels. The music sounds like TV show music and the girls look like TV show actresses. In a way, that makes the violence that much more shocking. This is a very pretty movie with a few very ugly moments, including a short but nasty torture scene.

A man wearing a cloth mask over his face strangles a fashion model and dumps her body in a closet. When the dead girl’s co-workers discover her diary it sets off a daisy chain of murders. The killer stalks his prey through mansions stuffed full of rugs, fancy furniture, exotic art and marble statues. I never knew modeling paid so well! Maybe the killings are the work of a sexual psychopath, but the slayings seem too calculated for that. The modeling world has a seamy side, with drugs and money and sleaze, and the killer seems right at home.

Blood and Black Lace is a giallo, and thus has both mystery and horror elements. What this movie doesn’t have is a protagonist. None of the characters in the ensemble cast are all that likable. The players display a distinct lack of morality, or perhaps it’s personality. Since they live in a superficial world dominated by looks, that’s not much of a surprise. But it is a fairly sophisticated bit of writing/filmmaking.

I saw Blood and Black Lace on Fandor, where it was advertised as ‘retro VHS style,’ not a selling point for anyone who remembers VHS. Despite this, Blood and Black Lace is still a very pretty movie. It’s dubbed, and the dubbing is good, but don’t look at the characters’ lips when they are talking. Despite all the positives, to me this movie gives off a Charlie’s Angels/Murder Mystery of the Week vibe. There are classics that don’t age well, but perhaps that isn’t fair. Blood and Black Lace was influential and it’s not Mr. Bava’s fault other directors imitated him.

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Ju-On: The Grudge

Writing a review of Ju-On: The Grudge is tough for me. This is a movie I avoided for months because I’d heard it was so scary. After actually watching it I was underwhelmed, but that might be because of my expectations. Or maybe I’m spoiled. Ju-On: The Grudge doesn’t hold a candle to Dark Water. I don’t know how it compares to Ringu, because I’ve only seen the American remake.

A man kills his wife, the family cat and his son. He dies soon afterwards. The house becomes cursed, meaning that anyone who steps foot inside dies. It might take awhile – even years – but eventually the ghosts will get you. The vengeful spirits in question are the wife Kayako, her son Toshio and the family cat. Sometimes the husband makes an appearance.

Rika is a social worker who enters the house to check on an elderly woman. It doesn’t take her long to meet the former occupants. The point-of-view switches to Kazumi, the elderly woman’s daughter-in-law; and then to Kazumi’s husband; and then the husband’s sister; and so on. This movie has no main character, which gives it the feel of a series of short films spliced together. It also makes it hard to view the characters as anything more than cannon fodder.

That would be okay, except Ju-On: The Grudge isn’t scary. It didn’t scare me, anyway. Parts of this movie are bizarre and freaky, but the jump scares didn’t make me jump. Perhaps that’s because I’m conditioned to respond to Hollywood type jump-scares. I give them points for creativity. Kayako crawls around on her belly and hisses like a rattlesnake and Toshio does a great cat imitation.

I wouldn’t describe Ju-On: The Grudge as a bad movie, but it has problems. It isn’t scary. The time shifts aren’t in chronological order, which is disorienting. I also didn’t care about any of the characters. This movie did hold my interest; my mood as I watched can be described as mildly interested. Perhaps my expectations were too high, or perhaps I’m not the intended audience and this is a movie for a younger audience.

 

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Berberian Sound Stage

Is it a bad sign when you go to Wikipedia because you aren’t sure what the movie you’ve just watched is about? That’s what I did after watching Berberian Sound Stage. I gather from the reviews I’ve read that a lot of people think this film is a work of genius, which means maybe I’m missing something. Maybe.

Gilderoy is an English sound engineer who travels to Italy to work on a movie he thinks is about horses. Too late, he discovers that the film is a giallo (an Italian thriller with mystery and horror elements) about witches. Berberian Sound Stage is set in the 70’s – the heyday of giallo – and the sound is dubbed in later, which is why Gilderoy’s services are needed. Members of the tech crew wear black gloves, another tribute to giallo.

Gilderoy is a pro. He’s also a little middle-aged man who lives with his mom in the English countryside. He doesn’t understand the language, so when the Italians speak amongst themselves he thinks they might be talking about him. Sometimes they are. They’re also trying to cheat him out of his plane fare; at one point the producer lectures Gilderoy about the joys of working for free.

Berberian Sound Stage begins with two plots. The giallo’s plot involves witches, torture and murder. The producer has fits making his starlets scream convincingly because the director – who does nothing but party – chooses his girlfriends as actresses. This leads to a subplot about sexual harassment that casts Gilderoy in a sympathetic light, but that plot never goes anywhere.

Gilderoy spends his days making skillets hiss and smashing watermelons with hammers to simulate the burning and piercing of human flesh. Since Gilderoy is a sensitive soul this bothers him. Why he doesn’t just quit is unclear. At Berberian Sound Stage’s halfway point a third storyline unfolds, which is when the plot fractures and this movie falls apart for me.

There are many things to like about Berberian Sound Stage. The movie looks great, with a spooky, atmospheric vibe, and Toby Jones’ performance as Gilderoy is excellent. I found the behind-the-scenes stuff about 1970’s movie sound work mildly interesting. I like movies, but – aside from the writing – don’t care about how they’re made.

The problem with Berberian Sound Stage is the plot; by the end I had no idea what was happening. I do think that sometimes plot can be overrated, but another element of the movie needs to step up, and that doesn’t happen here. Like the dubbing in a giallo, where the moving lips and the voice coming from the mouth don’t quite mesh, Berberian Sound Stage never quite comes together as a movie for me.

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What Have You Done to Solange?

SOLANGE_2D_BD.jpg

What Have You Done to Solange is one of those movies that you used to see being sold at horror conventions on grainy videotape. This is a giallo, an Italian/West German (?!?!) thriller/mystery/horror film. It is dubbed, and the dubbing seemed good to me. To my knowledge What Have You Done to Solange has never been widely released in the United States, and it took me about ten minutes to figure out why.

Enrico teaches at a Catholic girls’ school (college?) in London. A handsome Italian, he’s like a peacock strutting amidst a flock of peahens. Enrico rents a swinging bachelor’s flat even though he’s married and is having an affair with Elizabeth, one of his students. Later in the movie Enrico seems proud that their relationship is ‘pure,’ even though he spends all his time onscreen pressuring her to have sex.

Enrico and Elizabeth are on a boat on the river when Elizabeth witnesses a murder. The killer wears a long black frock and might be a priest. He or she seems to be targeting students at Enrico’s school, which already employs two sexual predators (Enrico and the teacher who peeks at the girls in the shower). By the way, the school’s dean gives Enrico’s relationship an unofficial thumb’s up.

Enrico is what passes for the hero in What Have You Done to Solange, which is this movie’s first big problem (out of three). Things might have been different back in 1974, but today a guy like Enrico would be in jail. At the very least, he is an unsympathetic character. After a nasty twist halfway through the movie, he’s not even vital to the plot.

What Have You Done to Solange contains a lot of symbolism – a white cat, four red apples wrapped in white paper, pins, a red towel – none of which is subtle. The murders are extremely brutal, and the misogyny of this movie is pretty in your face (the second problem). There’s no secret code. According to the makers of this film the girls do evil things like go to parties and do drugs and date and even have sex, and thus bring retribution on themselves.

The third problem with What Have You Done to Solange is that it doesn’t work as a mystery. In Dario Argento’s Deep Red you can figure out or at least guess the identity of the killer. That’s impossible here, because the writers don’t play fair. Solange is the key to the mystery, and she isn’t even mentioned until the movie is half over. If you are a fan of giallo, What Have You Done to Solange might be of interest; if not, don’t bother.

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John Dies at the End

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=my9Pr-W92SM

John Dies at the End is about drugs. Even I know that, and I know as much about drug culture as astrophysics. The name of the drug is the soy sauce, and it gives you all sorts of weird mental and psychic powers. It also messes up your sense of where you are in time, because time isn’t linear, or something like that. Parts of this movie reminded me of the scene in Animal House when they smoke pot.

Our hero is Dave Wong, not John. Dave is not Chinese, but he changed his last name to Wong to make him harder to find. He and his best friend John, who may or may not be dead, are psychic investigators. To the unguarded eye they appear to be a pair of fuck-ups, but appearances can be deceiving.

When the movie starts Dave is telling his story to reporter Arnie Blondestone at a Chinese restaurant. There’s a girl, and her dead boyfriend is stalking her. John and Dave discover the girl looks different to them when they’re in her basement. She dissolves into snakes – not spiders – and all the meats in the basement freezer form the Meat Man, who has a raw chicken for a head. The Meat Man isn’t as impressive as the Sunflower Man of Temple Wood fame, but he’s still quite a sight.

This scene has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. The real story starts when John and Dave graduate from high school and a Jamaican dude named Robert Marley gives John and a bunch of his friends a hit of a drug called the soy sauce. Dave isn’t there, but he runs to John’s place when John calls him in the middle of the night. John’s all fucked up, so Dave takes him to the hospital. Enroute, he’s attacked by a guy who tries to attach a lamprey to his chest.

There’s more. We have a psychic guru, a girl with an amputated hand and a dog that can drive. The soy sauce is actually bugs. Why would anyone be crazy enough to inject bugs? I assume if you have to ask the question, you’re not meant to know the answer.

John Dies at the End is directed by Don Coscarelli, who also directed Phantasm. If you liked Phantasm chances are you’ll like this movie. John Dies at the End has no coherent story, but is full of bizarre imagery and is as much science fiction as horror. A good portion of the climax is spent trying to explain the movie. It doesn’t take. Which is not to say that John Dies at the End is a bad movie. This is a film striving for cult status, and who knows? Maybe it’ll be regarded as a cult classic in twenty years. It’s certainly weird enough.

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The Color Out of Space

The Color Out of Space is an okay remake of the Lovecraft novelette of the same name. Apparently it is the third such remake. I saw one of them (The Curse) in the movies back in 1987 and recall that it starred Wil Wheaton and nothing else. Since this is a German remake, it takes place in Germany.

The framing story concerns John Davis, an American trying to find his missing father, who has vanished in Germany. He meets a man who knew his dad during the Second World War, and that man tells him a crazy story. I’m assuming the only reason John sticks around to the end is because he doesn’t know much German, although his knowledge of the language seems to fluctuate throughout the movie.

The man tells of a meteor crashing in a valley. Months later the crops are enormous, but bad; the trees seem to move, even though there’s no wind; and the family of farmers who live there succumb to an unknown illness. Something’s wrong with the water, and that something lives in the well.

The Color out of Space is filmed in black-and-white. The titular color of the title is violet. The filmmakers make a number of changes to the original story, which is fine since there’s no way the novelette can sustain a ninety minute movie. Whether those changes work is another matter. Lovecraft’s story is about ecological havoc, and the movie works best when it sticks to that theme.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the new ending of The Color Out of Space at all. I can’t say why, because spoilers. I’m not sure why I didn’t like this movie. It’s a serviceable remake, and maybe that’s the problem. When Lovecraft published his story in 1927, the concept of ecological devastation was groundbreaking, but there’s been about a million stories on the subject since then.

If you’re a Lovecraft fan, The Color Out of Space is worth a look; if not, I’d skip it.

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V/H/S

V/H/S is a horror anthology that consists of a framing story and five different segments, each directed by a different person. V/H/S is long for a horror film, two hours. The format is found-footage, which means the movie looks grainy and amateurish. This feels like the type of cheap horror flick you’d pick up at your local video store back when video stores still existed.

The framing story is about a bunch of fuck-ups stealing a VHS tape from an old man’s house. When they break in they find the old man sitting in his armchair before a bunch of VHS tapes and TV sets. The old man’s dead, except sometimes he gets up and walks around. The F-Us need to find the correct tape, so they start watching them all, and that’s when the fun starts.

The first segment, Amateur Night, involves a bunch of drunk dudes on the prowl who end up bringing home more woman than they can handle. I’m not sure if the director realized that the dude-bros are about a thousand times scarier than the monster, but since the dude-bros in question seem to be V/H/S’ target audience, I’m guessing not.

Second Honeymoon, about a vacationing couple, is directed by Ti West (House of the Devil fame), which means the story meanders along until something totally fucked up happens. The foreshadowing in this segment is so well-hidden it kills any suspense. You could watch it again to catch everything you missed, but is that a fair trade-off for the twenty minutes of life you’d lose?

Tuesday the 17th is about a killer in the woods who can only be seen through a video camera. It’s pretty typical hack/slash stuff. The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger is the best of the bunch. It’s about a guy’s long distance relationship via webcam with his girlfriend, who’s having unwanted night visitors. 10/31/98 features a bunch of stupid drunk guys who go to a Halloween party at the wrong house that seems to be empty but isn’t.

I’d heard mixed reviews about V/H/S before I watched it. Some people thought this movie was too long and dragged, but I’m not one of them. V/H/S held my interest. I thought the look and feel of all the segments was pretty consistent, and the use of found-footage was creative and interesting. That’s the good.

The bad: the lack of respect for women in this movie borders on misogyny. V/H/S has a sleazy vibe that is really off-putting (to me, anyway). I’m not sure if they were going for a grindhouse vibe, but it really backfired. The movie feels like it was made by a bunch of frat boys. There are way too many shots of leering guys and bare breasts. The directors are all men. There are good female directors in the horror community. Why not invite a few of them to the party?