Soskas Behind Bars: VENDETTA

Being, as you know, one of their foremost fans, I stayed up late last night to catch VENDETTA, the new film by AMERICAN MARY's Jen & Sylvia Soska, as soon as it premiered on VOD (Hulu Plus, in my case). It is also opening today at a select number of theaters in cities around the country - Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, Phoenix, Detroit, Tampa, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and New York.

I don't want to deprive the film of its surprises, so I'll just say that it's the raw story of a cop (Dean Cain) who commits a crime to get incarcerated, the better to avenge a more personal crime behind bars at Stonewall, an Illinois prison. It's not a horror movie and it's void of most fantasy aspects, which makes it not exactly my kind of movie - and, to their credit, the Soskas don't turn it into their kind of movie, either. Being a WWE production and co-starring Paul "The Big Show" Wight (7' tall and tipping the scales at 500 pounds), VENDETTA could have easily become a vehicle for a kind of outsized, cartoonish world of masculine fantasy - the male side of the coin to Russ Meyer's "Bosomania" pictures, if you will - but I don't think the propellents of this particular story (which include the murder of a pregnant woman) allowed the Soskas to take the material less than seriously.

The Soskas have been staking territory for themselves since the beginning as New Horror's foremost feminist filmmakers, but VENDETTA is pretty much wall-to-wall testosterone. There is nothing much here to outwardly signify that the Soskas were part of the project's DNA, apart from the presence of some key members of their most recent creative trust (DP Mahlon Todd Williams, production designer Troy Hansen, musicians the Newton Brothers) and some stylishly directed, wickedly violent fight and action sequences. While these demonstrate that the Soskas have grown considerably since their filming of similar scenes in 2009's maxed-out credit card debut DEAD HOOKER IN A TRUNK, it is otherwise as if they set themselves the challenge of making a picture while leaving their egos at the gate, or deliberately jumping into a project outside their comfort zone to discover how resourceful they could be in unfamiliar, Man's World terrain. In some ways, VENDETTA can be seen as a strategic calling card to Hollywood and the film business at large, as it proves beyond a shadow of doubt that the Soskas are not just quirky auteurs but stable workers for hire, able to color inside the lines when the work demands it - which would be great, if the the material was more original and interesting than what the Soskas themselves usually bring to a picture. This workman-like script, credited to newcomer Justin Shady (the IMDb also mentions Jacob Sullivan as a script contributor), isn't really worthy of them.

For the record, I had the same complaint when their fellow Canadian director, David Cronenberg, set his original screenwriting aside after VIDEODROME to test the more commercial waters of adaptation, as he did with 1983's THE DEAD ZONE. Some people love THE DEAD ZONE, but for me it's a film that any number of directors could have made, and one that some directors with far less talent than Cronenberg might have made even better. A more pertinent point of reference in this case might be Ken Russell's 1998 Showtime feature DOGBOYS, a prison drama starring none other than... Dean Cain. Russell, one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century, took the assignment to have work, to prove himself competent and employable, and it's a well-made action film of a not terribly ambitious kind. Having Russell's name on it may unfairly raise one's expectations of it. While VENDETTA is no DEAD ZONE (and doesn't aspire to be), it's a more satisfying Dean Cain vehicle than DOGBOYS, which, working within these lines, is a commendable thing.

So what are this movie's strengths? The big plus, right up front, is Cain himself - he gives a dark, hard-edged and committed performance as vengeful cop Mason Danvers (curiously, a name that's half AMERICAN MARY's Mary Mason, and half Fred Danvers, the role Cain plays in the SUPERGIRL pilot) so that he more than matches his towering WWE superstar opponent The Big Show in terms of mean. Also, while the film glories in bloodshed, it refuses throughout to beautify or fetishize violence. Williams' cinematography is both sleek and gritty, the music gives the film attitude and glide, and the stunt choreography by Dan Rizzuto (WATCHMEN, MAN OF STEEL, TOMORROWLAND) is tense and exceptional. It's also well worth staying in your seat for the end credits - not because there's a surprise at the end, but because the Soskas have punctuated the scrolled names with little bits of business that serve as little after-mints of style.

The aspect of the film that was most problematical for me was Michael Eklund's performance as Snyder, the prison warden. Sporting the worst, most distracting haircut I've ever seen in a movie, Eklund (a very good actor previously seen in SEE NO EVIL 2, and particularly effective in Xavier Gens' THE DIVIDE and BATES MOTEL) plays the warden like a skeezier Vincent Price with a suit and tie and an unfinished buzzcut. It's an impossibly eccentric performance, so people in search of a hoot may cotton to it; he plays the warden like the absolute last person anyone would put in charge of running a state prison, making the corruption of his office obvious from the get-go, while the script itself leaks such information in dribbles. I recognize that such obviousness would serve a point in the context of hipster satire, or the sort of male Meyeresque fantasy to which I alluded earlier, but in all other departments, this film puts itself forward as serious drama so I kept wishing the Soskas had reined him in.

If VENDETTA is fairly generic entertainment of its kind, we must remember that what is generic is the very essence of genre; it's where the word comes from. But the beauty of genre is commonplace material kissed by the presence of the extraordinary - whereas here I feel the Soskas were trying a little too earnestly to not intrude on the material, which is akin to a pair of Queens trying not to intrude on a winning hand. If the Soskas played this opportunity to show that they can direct a more mainstream kind of film as well as anyone, VENDETTA can be counted a modest success. Now that it has given them a better idea of their talent and its perimeters, here's hoping they hurry back to making those special films that only they can make. 



 

RIP Sir Christopher Lee (1922-2015)

The finale of Hammer's DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968).

The news of Christopher Lee's passing last Sunday, of accumulative respiratory problems and heart failure, at the age of 93 summons forth a flood tide of memories - most of them from a lifetime of sitting in darkened theaters, awed by his imposing presence. He was one of the true Titans of the screen. Even as a man, the people who met him often spoke of having been in the company of someone not only 6' 4" tall, but larger than life. "He was like a real lord," Daliah Lavi told me, while discussing their collaboration on Mario Bava's THE WHIP AND THE BODY (La frusta e il corpo, 1963).

In my audio commentary for Kino Lorber's TALES OF TERROR, I began by telling the story of my first encounter with monster magazines and how the three faces of Price, Lorre and Rathbone in that film (painted by the great Basil Gogos) were arranged on the cover of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND #19, the first monster magazine I ever handled. Also in that short stack of issues was CASTLE OF FRANKENSTEIN #2, whose cover was a Robert Adragna painting of a handsome man with penetrating features seated at a desk in a densely book-lined study, illustratative of that issue's feature article "The Many Faces of Christopher Lee." So, on the same day I made the acquaintance of monster magazines and the stars of TALES OF TERROR, I made the acquaintance of Christopher Lee - a man whose multiple monster portrayals suggested him as Lon Chaney's heir to the title of the Man of a Thousand Faces. Little did I know at the time that Lee's personal acting idol had been Conrad Veidt, the star of the earliest famous horror film, Robert Weine's THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919), but in hindsight no other actor comes close to being, as he was, the Conrad Veidt of our generation. In one towering package, he was dashing, debonair, villainous, cultured, athletic (he prized a belt buckle given to him by the members of the Stuntmen's Association for stunts that he performed himself on the set of AIRPORT '77) and - being fluent in at least five languages - truly cosmopolitan. I wouldn't be at all surprised if a good deal of my early exploration of European genre films wasn't in some large part due to Christopher Lee's participation in them.

One of my favorite childhood memories is of attending the (for me) long-awaited 1964-65 reissue of THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and HORROR OF DRACULA with my cousin Cathy, who was visiting from out of town. I had not previously seen either of them, though THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN had become a television favorite and THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN had played not too long before at my neighborhood theater; I was told they were her first horror films period. Both films had the reputation of being modern classics - Warren Publications had commemorated the double bill by issuing a fumetti magazine of both films, which I had already memorized - and they certainly lived up to their advance publicity. My grandmother told me the next morning that Cathy had evidently been disturbed by the experience - and I suppose she was, considering that she went on to teach a college course in Gothic literature.

I set out at first to be an artist, not a writer, so I initially expressed my appreciation for Christopher Lee in drawings. Looking back, there was a time of life when I spent a LOT of time drawing Christopher Lee - his face, his stature, his uniquely expressive hands, in different portrayals. This is his Rasputin, of course - one of my earliest surviving drawings, dating from 1972 when I was 15. I was by no means the only fan doing this. I can remember a somewhat earlier time, no later than 1967 or thereabouts, when my mother and stepfather took my little sister and I across town to visit some members of his family - we never met again, and I don't recall the exact nature of the relationship, but there was a boy there, slightly older than me, who had a stack of monster magazines and a bedroom wall covered with drawings that he had done of Christopher Lee. It was the damnedest thing I'd ever seen.

As much as I loved horror films as a kid, I felt myself moving away from them in the early 1970s. To my surprise, I was pulled back in by a preview screening of an unpromising-sounding Spanish picture called HORROR EXPRESS (1973) that co-starred Lee and his longtime partner Peter Cushing. I was prepared to be disappointed but something about the film reinvigorated by passion for the genre and I submitted my second review to CINEFANTASTIQUE, a couple of years after my first, which I had figured to be a one-shot. I haven't stopped writing about horror films since.

In the 25 years that VIDEO WATCHDOG has been extant, Christopher Lee was a good friend of the magazine and our extracurricular efforts. He provided an enthusiastic and welcome blurb for THE VIDEO WATCHDOG BOOK, promptly responded to my all of my questions with a personally-typed document of several pages when I was researching MARIO BAVA ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK, and he was sent every issue we ever printed. When issues went astray, we heard about it! He even appeared in our Letterbox department, a department we first introduced with a drawing I had done of his familiar hand reaching out of a letter-lined coffin.

I must channel most of what I have to say about Christopher Lee as an artist, an icon and correspondent into the eulogy that demands to be written for our next issue. But I didn't want this day to pass without saying something in acknowledgement of how much he was loved.

In closing, a brief story: On the occasion of Peter Cushing's death, my late friend Bill Kelley called Christopher Lee (a personal friend whom he called "the Old Man") to express his condolences and commiserate. Bill expressed to Chris how moved he was to see how warmly and personally Cushing's fans were taking the loss of "St. Peter", which prompted Chris - who must have reflected on his own deep shyness, his formality around people he had newly met, and his own nervously talkative nature - to sigh with deep-seated certainty, "Well, they won't feel that way about me."

I thought of this often today as I was scrolling down my Facebook news feed and seeing so many outpourings of affection that proved the Old Man wrong. He was more loved than he knew.

Zulawski's L'IMPORTANT C'EST D'AIMER on Import Blu-ray

I recently learned, while cruising Amazon, that Andrzej Zulawski's THE IMPORTANT THING IS TO LOVE - one of my favorite movies - was available on Blu-ray as a German import under the title NACHTBLENDE. Naturally, even though I have both the standard and deluxe editions of the domestic Mondo Vision DVD, I had to acquire it.

Sadly, it's a disappointing disc - the transfer is soft and pale, not at all what one expects from 1080p, with a greenish bias. The worst part is that the triple audio options (German, French, English) are not accompanied by subtitle options. So tonight I watched the film as I prefer not to do, in English, which at least reminded me that Howard Vernon dubs Klaus Kinski's performance on this track - which, along with the onscreen presence of Kinski, THE DIABOLICAL DR Z's Guy Mairesse and LORNA THE EXORCIST's Guy Delorme, made it feel like something of a Jess Franco reunion, which is far from the almost uniquely moving experience driven home by the (for the most part, live) French audio.

On the plus side, Georges Delerue's soundtrack is included on the disc in lossless 2.0 audio and sounds spacious and ravishing. Nevertheless, those five cues are not quite enough to compensate for the disappointing and limited presentation. This is not the upgrade it appears to be, and there is bound to be a better one sometime further down the line.

Here are some uncropped grabs from the VZ-Handelsgeselschafft disc, which is labeled Region B (PAL) but is in fact playable on domestic Region A players and available from Amazon.com.

VIDEO WATCHDOG's 25th Anniversary Sale - On Now!

Okay, VIDEO WATCHDOG readers, listen up!

Yesterday we mailed out VIDEO WATCHDOG #179, our 25th Anniversary issue. Today, we're following through by launching OUR BIGGEST SALE EVER!

Donna is presently scrambling to prepare and post the OFFICIAL announcement, but she's given me permission to give the friends of this blog an exclusive Early Bird Alert...

Effective NOW, VIDEO WATCHDOG is having a 25th ANNIVERSARY SALE - EVERYTHING (albeit for a limited time) is now 25% OFF!

That's digital issues, back issues, deluxe reprint editions, new subscriptions, Scratch & Dents, the digital Bava book - and yes, even the entire VW digital archive!

 Simply place your order at our website here and type in the special coupon code 25 YEARS as you check out. 

Franco's LABIOS ROJOS Available At Last

Ana Castor invents the Batusi in Jess Franco's LABIOS ROJOS.

Last night I watched Jess Franco's LABIOS ROJOS (1960) - his second feature, which (until this new, surprise Spanish DVD release from Impacto Films) was considered one of the most difficult of his many films to see. No collector of my acquaintance admitted to having it, and the only known print was on file at a cinemateca in Madrid. It was the first of Franco's several films about the two nutty gals (named Lola and Mari, this time around) who run the Red Lips detective agency. In this black-and-white adventure, which doesn't quite seem to know whether it wants to be a zany comedy or a serious crime picture, the Red Lips are hired to work on a case, get framed for murder, and must pose as exotic dancers at the Stardust Club to collar the real assassin. Yes, you've seen some shade of this story before in other Franco films, and the villains here include characters named Kallman, Radeck and Moroni - three names that echo throughout Franco's sprawling filmography, usually on the wrong side of judicial or moral law.

The DVD is presented solely in Spanish, with no subtitle option, so I could only follow the most obvious dialogue, but the performances are lively and comic with the two female leads, Isana Medel and Ana Castor (supposedly Franco's fiancée at the time, though they never married), fairly well in key with the ditzy characters portrayed by Rosanna Yanni and Janine Reynaud in 1967's KISS ME MONSTER and TWO UNDERCOVER ANGELS. The film is shot almost like a parody of an Orson Welles movie, with lots of Dutch angles and grotesque distortions and stylized shots of gun play in wharf shacks and jazz bands in nightclubs.

The film has an inconsistent look, containing second unit shots, various inserts and two or three scenes that were shot open aperture in contrast to the hard-matted 1.66:1 framing of majority of the picture. Carlos Aguilar's book on Franco mentions that the production ran out of money and was abandoned by its crew in protest before filming was completed. Two cinematographers are credited - Emilio Foriscot and Juan Mariné, both of whom enjoyed long and busy careers. According to to Franco authority Francesco Cesari, the film commenced production with Mariné, with whom Franco also made a couple of shorts around this time, but he had to leave when an opportunity for paying work arose. He was then replaced by Foriscot - whose later work would include such highlights as the Kriminal films, LA MARCA DEL HOMBRE LOBO with Paul Naschy, and Sergio Martino's BLADE OF THE RIPPER - who shot the majority of the film. If everyone abandoned the production at some point, it is possible that Franco himself took over to shoot the open aperture material, because this work doesn't show the same facility with lighting as the other footage. The most substantial full aperture content includes a scene of Kallman and his henchmen giving Mari a lift home in his car, and the exterior portions of a climactic shoot-out, scenes that incorporate dialogue but was shot either out-of-doors or in a car, so that none of it required the building of a set. The jazz bits aside, the non-diegetic score is much too frenzied and melodramatic - it often reminded of Roman Vlad's barnstorming score for Freda's I VAMPIRI.

LABIOS ROJOS is not quite steady on its feet but it's a likeable companion piece to Franco's first picture, TENEMOS 18 ANOS (1959) and obviously the work of the same man who made the far more confident THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF, THE SADISTIC BARON VON KLAUS and THE DIABOLICAL DR. Z.

As far as quality goes, just be glad it's available at all. The source material has the general appearance of a 16mm print. The transfer and mastering are barely acceptable, with neither clean-up nor anamorphic enhancement. Scenes with heavy blacks tend to digitize and break up, and the 1.66:1 matte box edges are exposed, leaving unevenly rounded corners and other distractions. I have cropped the frame grabs below to make a better impression.

Just as surprising as the sudden availability of the main feature is the disc's only extra, EL TREN EXPRESO ("The Express Train"), a heretofore unknown short (running just under 10m) produced by Franco's company Golden Films International and directed by Rosa Maria Almirall - the real name of actress Lina Romay. Based on the poem by Ramon Campoamor, which is read aloud by "Laura Arias" (Romay herself), it uses children's book and travel book illustrations to forge a charming valentine to the bygone days of the luxury railcar. It is completely unlike anything else we've ever seen from Lina Romay.

Where can you find it? Try here.

Backstage and Onstage: Souvenirs of Vincent Price

As I've mentioned here before, I once had the great pleasure of meeting and interviewing Vincent Price at Dayton's Memorial Hall, when he was up there preparing to star in a Kenley Players production of "Damn Yankees." The date was July 13, 1976. Since I had the opportunity to conduct the interview but didn't drive, my friend Brian Gordon offered to drive me up for a chance to take part. I was recently interviewed about this experience for a forthcoming COLUMBUS MONTHLY story about the Kenley Players by Peter Tonguette, who was interested in seeing the other photos I took on this important day. Granted, they aren't very good photos - it was not the best camera, and there was no way of telling what I had until the shots came back from the drugstore - but they have a certain historical value to aficianados of regional theater and Mr. Price himself.

The first shot to the left is a picture of a wall in the theater's green room area. Even in 1975, the tinted photo of Ethel Merman looked very old and obviously one of her co-stars had come loose from his or her gaffer's tape. It seemed to say something profound about the world of show business and its backstage realities and I'm glad I preserved it. I remember the receptionist chiding me with a smile as I took the photo: "Now don't be making fun of my green room." The second photo, as you might guess, was taken in Mr. Price's dressing room and shows where he sat as I conducted the very first interview for MARIO BAVA - ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK.

But if any of these shots has anything more than curiosity value it's this last one. As Brian and I were leaving, making our way through the seats toward the exit, we heard Mr. Price and a keyboard accompanist beginning to rehearse a song-and-dance number onstage - probably "The Good Old Days," as it was his character's only solo number. We stayed and watched for a minute and - perhaps inappropriately - I snapped this photo of the rehearsal just before we left. I've never seen any stills documenting this performance, so this image just might be all there is.

To round things off, I was able to find this reproduction of the play's program book via Google. I had no idea that Pia Zadora had the female lead in this production!

All original photos (c) by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

First Look: VIDEO WATCHDOG 179

Overworked as we are, it's hard to believe that Donna and I have now been publishing VIDEO WATCHDOG for 25 years - but next month, when this issue hits newsstands, will indeed mark the occasion of our Silver Anniversary. That's as long as Warren Publications issued the initial run of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND - and it makes me very proud to say that we managed to do it without a single feature article reprint. Once or twice, we have printed a review that we'd previously published, but those were accidents!

Anyway, we turned in this issue to our printer yesterday, and they got a hard proof copy to us in record time today. We're so pleased and proud of this accomplishment, I told Donna that we needed to commemorate it with a photo. After seeing the result, she was pleased to see that her Silver Anniversary ring had been included in the shot, as well - a nice little grace note.

Follow this link to a free 20-page digital preview.

A Morning With Jess

I went to bed earlier than usual and awoke much earlier than usual. The angle of the sunlight in all the rooms of the house feels alien to me; it was much too direct behind my computer screen and I had to draw the shades. Not feeling quite alert enough to start working, I decided to watch all the extras on the two new Jess Franco releases from Severin, VAMPYROS LESBOS and SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY, which brought me back into that world.

It was both wonderful and sad to see Jess again, and the contrast between him at the end and the footage of the more vigorous, obsessive and ambitious man he was when he was younger, acting in his own films. Since he died, I have watched maybe three of his films; they feel different to me now that they are no longer part of a living continuum. Not less important, just different; I saw enough in the clips accompanying the extras to know that these films are getting richer in perspective, and in retrospective. When Jess was alive and still making films, any move he made held the possibility of affecting everything else he had done. Bringing back Al Pereira, or casting Lina in her final role as Alma Pereira in PAULA-PAULA, it had an effect on the way I thought of a dozen other pictures featuring that character, or a riff on him like Antonio Mayans' Al Crosby in LA NOCHE DE LOS SEXOS ABIERTOS.

Seeing the clips of VAMPYROS LESBOS where Jess was basically restaging with Soledad Miranda and Ewa Stroemberg the scene in DRACULA where Bela Lugosi offers Dwight Frye wine with his dinner, but with sunlight instead of moonlight and fishing nets everywhere instead of cobwebs, I made the connection that, here, he was reinventing everything, as a director, in the same way that Christina von Blanc's character would reinvent everything that she sees in A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD, as a schizophrenic mental patient - seeing the mental hospital where she is kept as a hotel, and the doctors as hotel staff. It's an opportunity for the filmmaker to use whatever they have at their disposal to tell any story they care to tell, and for the viewer, it's an opportunity to see differently.

The Blu-ray presentations look exquisite. Frame grabs from Severin's VAMPYROS LESBOS.

 Frame grabs from Severin's SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RIP Ivo Garrani (1924-2015)

RIP Italian actor Ivo Garrani, who has passed away in his sleep on March 25 at the age of 91. Garrani was best remembered for playing Prince Vajda (the father of Barbara Steele's character) in Mario Bava's BLACK SUNDAY (pictured), but he had a long history of playing compromised or corrupt noblemen in earlier films that Bava photographed, including HERCULES, ROLAND THE MIGHTY and THE GIANT OF MARATHON. He also worked with Bava on Leopoldo Trieste's CITTA DI NOTTE and the first Italian science fiction film, THE DAY THE SKY EXPLODED.

Thanks to Luca Rea's interview with Garrani for my book MARIO BAVA - ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK, we know that the THE DAY THE SKY EXPLODED - though officially credited to Paolo Heusch - was in fact first proposed and covertly directed by Mario Bava, officially its cinematographer and special effects artist.

Additionally, Ivo Garrani he appeared in such films as ATOM AGE VAMPIRE, HERCULES AND THE CAPTIVE WOMEN and THE SLAVE, as well as Roberto Rossellini's GENERALE DELLA ROVERE, Luchino Visconti's THE LEOPARD and the Napoleon epic WATERLOO.