Opening Day Look Back at the Weird, Old America

Martin Scorsese's new documentary ROLLING THUNDER REVUE - A BOB DYLAN STORY premiered on Netflix today, and I eagerly renewed my lapsed subscription to enjoy it on Opening Day. I had a complicated response to it and probably won't be writing about it anywhere else at great length, but three things I will say:

1) Dylan's alert and seething performances are Punk BEFORE Punk;

2) Joni Mitchell sure had some ace chord changes in her;

and 3) the escalating duel of masks between Dylan and Roger McGuinn during the chorus of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" is as scary as anything in ONIBABA.

Because it's gnawing at me, I'll toss in one more:

4) I've never considered Allen Ginsberg a great poet, but he was a writer - and thus well above playing valet to anyone on this tour, as a requirement of staying on it. Just hearing about this indignity recalled to mind the words "dime", "prime" and "didn't you?"

(c) 2019 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

RIP Narciso Ibáñez Serrador (1935-2019)

I regret to report the passing of this Spanish master of horror, responsible for the noted Televisión Española series HISTORIAS PARA NO DORMIR ("Stories to Keep You Awake," which produced 29 episodes between 1966 and 1982), and two great additions to the horror genre during the 1970s: LA RESIDENCIA (US: THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED, 1970) and WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? (US: ISLAND OF THE DAMNED, 1976). The son of actress Pepita Serrador and the legendary actor/director Narciso Ibáñez Menta (who played a most impressive Count in THE SAGA OF THE DRACULAS), he was the subject of early coverage in the pages of VIDEO WATCHDOG - see Alan Jones' fine coverage in VW #4 for a fuller account. He was 83 years old.

(c) 2019 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

The Americanization of Godzilla, Pt. 3 (Three Strikes)

I saw the new Legendary Studios "MonsterVerse" offering GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS and wished I had brought my iPad with me; it's the kind of film that begs for a play-by-play report on how awful it is. For example: at one point near the climax, Mark and Dr. Emma Russell (Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga) - the idealistically opposed (and separated) husband and wife who are presented to us as the emblems of the American Family - are speeding in a commandeered vehicle through a belching hellscape of roaring flames, toppling cranes, and falling flotsam as Rodan and King Ghidorah are fighting in the air almost exactly above them, roaring and tangling ass and looking like some kind of spinning prehistoric swastika in the sky. At the same time they are recklessly (and somehow wrecklessly) navigating this primordial nightmare, Mark and Emma are arguing about - what else? - their kid (STRANGER THINGS' waif Millie Bobby Brown)! They are actually comfortable and accustomed enough to everything that's exploding around them to have a Zuławski-scale, POSSESSION-style domestic row.

This film - the third American go at Godzilla, and the first American "monster rally" fully staffed by Toho creations - was co-written and directed by Michael Dougherty, a 35-year-old Columbus, Ohio native whose scorecard includes the story for X-MEN: APOCALYPSE and the scripts for SUPERMAN RETURNS, the TRICK OR TREAT franchise, and KRAMPUS, which he also directed. Most of his work is co-authored with Zach Shields, so he doesn't come up with this stuff alone. Stanley Kubrick once said that the secret to any successful film was "six non-submersible elements" - in other words, six moments that foreground themselves in the viewer's memory. What the Dougherty/Shields team have spitballed here can be broken down to a number of non-submersibles - in addition to the KRAMER VS. KRAMER heroes, we get the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS shot, the ABYSS shot, the ALIEN 3 shot, the INDEPENDENCE DAY shots, the BLADE RUNNER bad weather, the non-stop emphasis on location print-outs, and Rodan sequences more indebted to 1957's THE GIANT CLAW than anything Ishiro Honda and Eiji Tsubaraya ever did. There are also "Easter Egg" references to Toho content - there's a Dr. Serizawa, an Oxygen Destroyer, and 2046's exquisite Ziyi Zhang as twin doctors in a nod to the twin fairies played by the Peanuts in Mothra films - but shouldn't "Easter Eggs" be hidden and clever, rather than a series of Trivial Pursuit cards?

The film gives us a Godzilla that resembles the Rock of Gibraltar, a fire-trailing Rodan, a more bug-like Mothra, and a King Ghidorah whose royal form of address stands in open conflict with the film's title. There is also an end credits coda promising us more of the same. Yes, the occasional image is impressive - but they are all too often second-hand, and don't we deserve more?  

In some ways, this pommelling spectacle is a depressingly accurate portrait of America at the moment: it loves its covert operations, its guns, its bombs, its military, its own swagger; it claims an overriding love of/belief in family, yet it reserves its right to independent action and walking out on the responsibility of individual child rearing for the “greater” good; there is no suspense on offer because the sheer barrage of it all, never clearly seen, never lets up; the overbearing militaristic stance is countered by the reverent ecological viewpoint common to so many Toho films only to deem its advocate "crazy" (and - wouldn't you know it? - "crazy" saves the day). Though the world as we know it is imperiled  nothing is taken seriously, least of all wisdom; when an Asian cast member expresses a meaningful observation, he puts us back at our ease by saying it was something he once read in a fortune cookie. Similarly, whenever the characters are confronted with something of genuinely godlike proportions, they either stare back into its face unimpressed, or crack a cheap joke (including the most-quoted line from Carpenter's THE THING, made almost 40 years ago) to scale its grandeur down. Nothing's bigger than the armed forces in this picture.  

It’s an odd thing to say about movies featuring men in rubber suits, but the original Toho films - at their best - recognize that these kaiju (now called "Titans") are animals, fellow creatures that warrant our awe and respect. Here in the US, where “awesome” has come to mean something loud and trivial, filmmakers have so far been uncomfortable with the "God" in Godzilla and diminish him at every turn by cracking "bigger boat"-type jokes, trailer moment profundities ("God Save the King"), and verbal bankruptcies like "Oh, shit!" And when our armed forces can’t get him to bend the knee to their blazing combat, they find a way to recruit him. This is a long way from Toho's Gojira, who did not concern himself with lowly human affairs but was somehow attuned to which threats were merely personal and which were specifically directed against the planet. Gojira was never recruited because a) it couldn't be done, b) the military had already declared open war on him at every turn, even selling him into outer space slavery in INVASION OF THE ASTRO-MONSTER (1965), and c) his planet, his fight. The rest of us could only watch in wonderment. When the fights were over, what was restored was a kind of armed peace between Tokyo and Gojira. Mutual respect - which you don't get here, not least of all because the human characters aren't real enough to be worth it.

I'm surprised by how many people seem to be enjoying this inchoate mess, which they are comparing to DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (1968, never a favorite anyway) rather than the more apropos Toho franchise blow-out GODZILLA: FINAL WARS (2004). When their argument is “It’s only a movie, I had fun, lighten up,” I can only surmise that’s all most people want - a little escapism with enough self-importance attached to help them feel less ashamed about going along for the ride. Trouble is, I'm "deep" (a word which the high school girls of my youth considered the equivalent of "a leper"). GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS wasn't escapist to me; it felt confrontational from the throwdown of its get-go (or should that be from the get-go of its throwdown?) In its unleashed, careening indiscipline, I could readily see most of what's wrong with our world up there on the big screen, lurking behind any number of queasily transparent masks. Such self-exposure should be purging, but in this case, the operatic chaos, the persistence of noise so loud you can't hear yourself think, simply shows us how truly screwed we are - not only by our shown propensity for bad decisions, but by the ironic glee we take as an audience (a society?) in the clusterfucks of others.

(c) 2019 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

Recent TV Bingeings

MR. NOVAK - THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON (Warner Archive): I can't recommend this collection of 30 one-hour episodes highly enough; it's quite simply the best classic television release I've seen since Shout! Factory's THE DEFENDERS of a couple of years ago. 

James Franciscus stars as the new, young English teacher at Jefferson High School - a fairly conservative, tightly run school with daily flag-raising bugle calls and frequent class assemblies. Each episode brings Novak into collision with an outdated school ruling, a troubled but promising student, a moral quandary, or questions about what the boundaries between teacher and pupil should be. The problems tackled include everything from teenage pregnancy and drug addiction to teenage crushes and the panic of producing a senior prom. Sometimes they get the problem licked, and sometimes they are brought to their knees by one and fade-out on the admission that you can't work miracles in an hour but you can certainly raise important questions.

I truly feel that our world is off the rails these days partly because our television programming is no longer interested in giving us this kind of socially responsible guidance, along with assumptions for our intelligence. Dean Jagger (WHITE CHRISTMAS, X THE UNKNOWN) is the school's principal, Albert Vane, and he's the most fascinating aspect of each episode. We may not always agree with him, but he's clearly a sensitive, intelligent man - we feel the pride and the burden of his authority - and he ultimately unfolds as a deeply humane man with a military core, but able to learn from his mistakes and evolve beyond them. I have more than a dozen favorite episodes, but I was most impressed by an episode featuring Brenda Scott as a withdrawn student whose talents for satire and cartooning are discovered, turning up the pressure for her to connect with the school paper.

A number of familiar young actors from this period turn up in class, including Frankie Avalon, Tommy Kirk, Shelley Fabares, Kim Darby, Brooke Bundy, Christopher Connelly, Tim McIntire, and "Terry Garr," and the outstanding adult guest stars include Lilian Gish (as a teacher of long standing whose job is threatened by parents wanting her blood for teaching sex education), Barbara Barrie and Kathryn Hays (absolute magic in an episode that finds Novak in a complex and troubling romantic situation). You owe it to yourself to see this. Co-created by Boris Sagal (THE OMEGA MAN).

FOREVER (Amazon Prime): A somewhat obnoxious, quirky, married couple (Maya Rudolph, Fred Armisen) end up in Heaven, whose eternal sameness begins to grate on their nerves. It's an interesting concept - that the idea of eternal peace may be aggravating to human nature, thus flying in the face of the accepted religious concept of eternal reward. This show takes its premise in some interesting directions - as matters of materialism, plan-making, and even gender begin to break down the characters' earthly personalities and commitments, but it never achieves the same level of exciting complexity as RUSSIAN DOLLS. This might get better with Season 2, but the story feels somewhat self-contained. Catherine Keener, Peter Weller, and Julia Ormond are also in the cast.

SNEAKY PETE, Season 3 (Amazon Prime): This ongoing story of an ingenious and somewhat soulless con man (Giovanni Ribisi), who always seems to have several cons unfolding simultaneously and in frequent conflict, continues to up its ante - ongoing since the first episode - and impress with its three-dimensional complexity. In this season, Marius/Pete continues to find his accidental ties to the Bowman family tightening, and threatening to humanize him, just as the cold-blooded love of his life (Efrat Dor) reappears to tempt him with a wine-based con that stands to make them millions. Naturally, everything goes wrong. This is extremely satisfying bingeing material, and Ribisi and co-stars Marin Ireland and Margo Martindale are fascinating to watch - Ribisi's smile is worth an essay in itself, a kind of pained grimace of pleasure that makes him look almost on the verge of being physically sick. Another point of interest in this latest run of episodes is the last acting role for Ricky Jay, to whom the penultimate episode is dedicated. He apparently didn't finish his role as a card-flashing trickster and is replaced in the final episode by a suitable stand-in viewed from behind, with - I assume - his dialogue looped in from a recorded table reading. I think he would have appreciated the Lugosi-like trickiness of it all. This isn't quite a great series yet, but it's quite an impressive feat of staging and calculation.

A MAN CALLED SHENANDOAH: THE COMPLETE SERIES (Warner Archive): This is a black-and-white Western series that dates back to ABC, 1964; its broadcast coincided with the similarly themed contemporary series CORONET BLUE. It stars WAGON TRAIN's Robert Horton as a man, fast on the draw, who is recognized and attacked by a band of bad guys, led by Richard Devon. He survives the attack but awakens with amnesia - and then rides off into 30-odd episodes in which he follows one clue to the next toward the discovery of who he really is, and whether he is a good man or a bad man. 

This sort of thing can also be traced back to the 1940s radio and Columbia B-movie series THE CRIME DOCTOR, and considering its timing, it may have been partly inspired by the success of THE FUGITIVE, which premiered the previous year, and featured a central character in search of another who might prove his innocence. I haven't watched too many of these yet, but the few episodes I've seen have been let down by their brevity; this really needed to be an hour-long show, given its dramatic and psychological nature. Furthermore, this show - like CORONET BLUE - was not renewed after its initial season, so the big question it dangles before us in each episode is never answered. But it's not the arrival, it's the journey - right? At half an hour, it's reduced to opportunities to see a lot of great talent from this Golden Era of Television, including numerous OUTER LIMITS actors like Martin Landau and Warren Oates. Robert Horton - who was later bound for THE GREEN SLIME - is good, too.

(c) 2019 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

Looking Back At, and Looking At, FRANKENSTEIN - 1970

Circa 1963, I was a six or seven year old, newly enamored of what everyone back then called "Monster Books" though they were actually magazines. They contained page after page of horrific yet fascinating images from films I'd never seen and, in most cases, had never heard of - and it was these photos, rather than moving pictures, that acquainted me with the likes of Frankenstein's Monster ("Frankenstein" for short), Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Peter Lorre - who, for some reason, seemed a part of the group. It was sometime during the early part of that year when I happened to hear that FRANKENSTEIN, with Boris Karloff, was going to be that weekend’s matinee at my neighborhood theater, the Plaza. I was living at the time in the care of a single mother with an moderately older son; he was at the age when he didn’t want to be seen hanging around with a younger kid, so my only chance to see this most important of films was to go myself. It took a little convincing because the theater was about a mile away from the house, and involved crossing the street at a dangerous intersection, but I was persistent, probably cried, and finally got permission to go to the movie unattended. It was a different world then.

The admission price was a hefty 75 cents, and I retain the sensation of those three quarters tightly held in my little dimpled fist. When I got to the theater, there was already a long line awaiting the afternoon matinee. I don’t recall seeing any posters displayed, probably because I was so intently focused on the unrehearsed ritual of exchanging my quarters for a ticket, and how quickly that ticket was torn once I was inside the lobby. I followed the others into the theater and grabbed a seat about midway toward the screen, on the left and on the aisle - because, as regular readers of this blog know, I had a history of running out of the theater screaming when I went to see a horror picture. 

When the houselights went down, there was a big cheer - the kids there, who were mostly young teenagers and other kids slightly older than me, were that eager to be entertained. If you think about it, their only frame of reference was amusement parks and birthday parties, where the whole idea of entertainment is that you provide half of it with your own enthusiasm. There were a few trailers I don't specifically remember and then the film began - the first film I ever saw by myself. 

And the crowd of paying customers went wild!

To my initial disappointment, the film proved not to be FRANKENSTEIN but Howard W. Koch's FRANKENSTEIN - 1970, a film I'd never heard of! Nevertheless, it was going to be my first Frankenstein film and my first exposure to Boris Karloff, so I wasn't about to demand a refund. And I'm glad I didn't because I was not in the least disappointed.

Mike Lane teasing the frame as the Monster in the opening sequence.

What I remember most indelibly from that fateful afternoon matinee is the fantastically eerie opening sequence from the film within the film; how the audience went ballistic as the monster pursuing the imperiled heroine through ghastly fog hunkered down with his undulating claws - teasing us with the possibility he might hunker low enough for his face to come into frame; the screams of the teenage girls whenever the bandaged monster-in-progress loomed in the darkness; the way the scar-faced and ogreish Karloff (as a descendant of the real-life Dr. Frankenstein) flamboyantly adorned himself with the scarf given by Jana Lund’s character to the newly-dispatched butler Schuter, openly revealing in this stolen bit of affection; and most distinctly, the penetrating quality of Karloff’s radio-schooled voice, tender yet cruel, which wheedled its way behind my hands as I tried in vain to hide my eyes.

Karloff as the disfigured ex-Nazi Baron Victor von Frankenstein.

Warner Archive recently issued FRANKENSTEIN - 1970 on Blu-ray and the presentation of its black-and-white scope image perfectly complements how I remember its gigantic image on the screen during that childhood matinee. Watching it, I can still hear the happy screams of that mostly teenage audience. I wonder how many of those youngsters are still with us, or if any of them will actually buy Warner Archive's new Blu-ray disc as a souvenir of the fun it once gave them in the dark. But I remember, and this cherished memory of mine seems a vital, vanished link to the film’s actual prowess, because its reputation has never been very hot among a younger group of people who grew up watching a badly-cropped and commercially-interrupted presentation on television. This was one of those films from the late Fifties made in scope to entice people to theaters for an experience they couldn’t get on television, yet it was quickly retired there with only half of its available image. This is the hobbled way in which the film survived for approximately 50 years, at which point the widescreen version suddenly popped up on cable broadcasts.

Vanity, thy name is Karloff - using a promotional still of the period to create his perfect Man.

Revisiting the film helped me to discover an aspect I hadn’t grasped as a child: namely, that Karloff’s character suggests to his confidant Wilhelm (SHE DEMONS' Rudolph Anders) that his body was defiled by wartime tortures, strongly implying that he was not only facially disfigured but also emasculated. With this adult detail in mind, his attempts to create life in the form of his remembered self (using a mixture of actual and synthetic flesh, of his own devise) can be seen as his attempt to reassert his masculinity, his virility, with worthiness of the sexy young women visiting his castle as members of the film crew. Throughout the film, we see that Karloff is deeply drawn to the blonde young actress played by Jana Lund, who can’t help recoiling at the sight of him; we feel his rejection, his offense, and his aforementioned sadistic flaunting of the scarf she gave to Schuter (Norbert Schiller) as a gift, which he wraps around his neck like a stolen caress. This monstrous surface, parading behind a mask of courtly courtesy, is too complex a creation to be passed off as ham - the word that critics of this film tend to use in reference to Karloff’s deliberately overbearing, over-compensating performance. The film's finale, often written-off as a fizzle, actually has some poignancy if we're attuned to this aspect of the doctor's mad dream.

The Baron bakes his creation to life in his 1970-savvy atomic reactor - mail-order, of course! 

The disc includes an audio commentary featuring affable film historians Tom Weaver and Bob Burns, along with surviving cast member Charlotte Austin, who plays the acerbic script girl Judy. The group lodge the familiar complaints against the film - that it's all downhill after the opening sequence, that Karloff’s performance is ham sliced thick - but it’s clear that Burns and Weaver have a nostalgic love for it anyway. It’s a fun listen, and Weaver comes to the session equipped with loads of production details and cast information. We find out when it was shot and on which leftover sets, and it's pointed out that the film shows the influence of Hammer's recent THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957) is terms of Karloff handling, palpating, dropping, and divesting himself of various organs and body parts in a gristle-grinding disposal unit. Austin, still sounding youthful and sassy, clearly had no high regard for the film when she was making it (she recalls having a drink too many and crashing fellow cast member Tom Duggan's live LA talk show to bad-mouth it), but her recollections of being present during the filming and her fellow cast members are a dear addition. Particularly interesting are the notes on cast member Mike Lane, who plays the monster and hired help at the Frankenstein castle. He’d previously appeared as a boxer in THE HARDER THEY FALL with Humphrey Bogart (whose last picture it was) and got better critical notices than anyone else in the picture. For some reason, the kudos did him no good as he went immediately into this picture, some Italian sword and sandal fare, and still other Frankenstein roles.

While not on the level of the finest Frankenstein films, FRANKENSTEIN - 1970 is nevertheless a better than average horror film of the "I Was a Teenage..." period and the repository for what I consider one of Karloff's most underrated and admirably modulated performances. It is particularly worth seeing now with its super-crisp representation of Carl E. Guthrie's black-and-white scope cinematography. Guthrie's name is not as well known as some, but his credits include William Castle's MACABRE and HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, John Cromwell's CAGED, and a stint as one of the cameramen on the black-and-white version of MGM's horror classic DOCTOR X (1932) - the first movie about "synthetic flesh"!

(c) 2019 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

This Year's Rondo Winners Announced

The winners, runners-up, and honorary mentions in the 17th Annual Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards have been announced and the list can be found here. Congratulations to everyone whose work was rewarded and recognized! And a big thanks to Mr. David Colton for all the hard work he puts into formally appreciating all the hard-working people who devote themselves to the field of horror and fantasy in film.

This year, I was pleased and honored to have my work on Kino Lorber's THE NIGHT STALKER and THE NIGHT STRANGLER voted Best Commentary, and I'm extremely proud to have been part of David J. Schow's team of commentators for Kino's two OUTER LIMITS box sets, whose bounty (beginning with 42 audio commentaries!) was rightly acknowledged as recognized as Best Package of DVD Extras. My thanks to Kino Lorber's Frank Tarzi and Bret Wood for involving me in these terrific projects. 

I was also surprised and delighted that Video WatchBlog placed as one of the Runners-up for Best Website, its first success in this category for a good many years. I may not be here every day, but I like to think what I deliver is cherce.

Incredible as it seems, this Best Commentary Rondo is my nineteenth, including the Hall of Fame and Legacy Awards, though there are other wins by association, as with Tom Weaver's Rondo-winning interview with Donnie Dunagan, which I published in VIDEO WATCHDOG #112, and now the OUTER LIMITS Rondo. Rondo and its supporters have been very good to me.

There is honor too in just being nominated, and I was pleased to have my SPIRITS OF THE DEAD monograph nominated for Best Book among so many other worthy projects. I knew it was a long shot, because it's a monograph - about one film - and, in this case, a film that's generally considered uneven and offbeat. For me, the book itself is my reward - I'm so pleased with it and so delighted it exists. In case you still haven't bought yours, here's a handy link to its Amazon page.

(c) 2019 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

A Descent Into THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM

Harald Reinl quoting Mario Bava in THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM.

Last Saturday night, I decided to revisit Harald Reinl’s DIE SCHLANGENGRUBE UND DAS PENDEL (“The Snake Pit and the Pendulum,” 1968) - known here in the USA as BLOOD DEMON or by its TV title (believe it or not) THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM. As it happens, the timing was just a hair shy of sacrosanct, as the story takes place on Good Friday!

I wouldn’t call this film a masterpiece but it’s jolly good spookshow fodder, with intoxicating art direction and a wonderfully wild, nightmarish imagination. It draws from Poe, Hoffmann, Corman, Bosch, Mario Bava (in a big way), and the cinematography is recognizably the work of Ernst W. Kalinke, who also shot CASTLE OF THE CREEPING FLESH with Michel Lemoine and soon after shot MARK OF THE DEVIL. The cast - principally Christopher Lee (as the undead Count Regula), Lex Barker, and Karin Dor - is very good, the fairy tale-cum-surrealist atmosphere is relentlessly fantastic and creepy, Peter Thomas’ score is ogreish and loony, and Karl Lange (who principally plays Lee’s creepy undead henchman, revived - like Universal's Ygor - after being hanged) plays as many as three additional roles without credit: a man peering from an upstairs window in the public square, an actor in the guise of Christ carrying a cross, and a mysterious vagrant encountered in a burned-out cottage in the woods.

Karin Dor and Karl Lange.

Speaking of credits, Reinl manages to make the main title sequence - though a brazen rip-off of Mario Bava's opening sequence in BLACK SUNDAY - somewhat unnerving when it shows a sustained tracking shot of Lee, a bronze mask nailed to his face, being led through a series of corridors. The bronze mask, always central to the composition, is disturbingly fashioned in the likeness of a smiling face, and at one point shortly before the director's credit, its eyes suddenly appear to glow from within and look unwaveringly back at the viewer. It's a real goosepimpler! 

I was prompted to watch the film because of its inclusion in Severin's delightful new HEMISPHERE HORRORS box set, which features it on a bonus disc with Harold Hoffman's THE BLACK CAT (1966). The Severin presentation is a 2K presentation of two cobbled-together 16mm TV prints bearing the TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM title on a crudely inserted white card with a drippy black font. This was the only way I'd ever seen the film before, but I later discovered this version on YouTube, bearing a Troma logo (with removable subtitles, no less), which shows a properly designed title card consistent with the surrounding footage - I'm amazed this exists, yet it is rarely seen in circulating prints! The colors and clarity here are also much better than the version on the Severin disc, which basically ranks as no better than filler. 

Karin Dor and Lex Barker in the Hall of Skulls.

I didn't remember having it, but I consulted my personal catalogue and discovered that I had the EMS German DVD (which I believe may now be out of print) stashed away in my attic, with the shrink-wrap still on it! The transfer here has its problems - some aliasing and whatnot - but it is far better than the Severin presentation or any other commercial option I know about. The color here has a SUSPIRIA-like intensity at times that is completely lost in domestic versions - think Reinl must have influenced Argento on some level. The scene where Count Regula is revived and his valet Anatole warns the prisoners to look away because they mustn’t set eyes on a moment so sacred - and then we see him slowly arise and be cloaked in a silhouette cast on an ornate wall - that’s pure Mater Suspiriorum. 

The first third of the film is taken up with a chilling coach trip through the haunted forest in which Castle Regula is nested, and the extended set-pieces boast a pictorial audacity we might also associate with Bava; Lex Barker, as the hero, looks like he was told to watch KILL, BABY... KILL! and to reprise Giacomo Rossi Stuart’s Dr. Eswai in his comportment and every move; there is a remarkable likeness between the two. But once the characters get inside the fabulously booby-trapped castle, the imagery turns colder, weirder and more grandiose than anything Bava would do. As bold as he could be, Bava tended to be focused on the actors he chose and his camera work - the way he saw things - rather than in the sets. Working here with art directors Gabriel Zellon and Ralf Zehetbauer, Reinl proves himself a potent stylist in his own right. The forest sequences are terrific, but the scene of Karin Dor's entrapment in the castle's snake pit and the Boschian design of the pendulum room are appropriately nightmarish and memorable. At one point in the film, Christopher Lee - his blue-gray face pocked with nail marks - says, “Now my vengeance is complete!” It made me wonder how many times in his career, especially during this period what with his Dracula and Fu Manchu movies, he was called upon to reprise these very words!

The German disc also includes some nifty extras, including two Super 8 condensed versions of the film (with sound), two black-and-white German television clips of visits to the set (we get to hear portions of Barker's and Lee's interviews in English), and - for the benefit of German-speakers - a 40m audio interview with Karin Dor. The disc has an English language option that doesn't extend to the extras. By the way, you will find online some mention of other actors responsible for dubbing the dialogue of Lee and Barker, but this information pertains solely to the German track. Lee dubs his own voice in English, and I believe Barker does too. Indeed, Barker's voice - not that familiar to me - was very familiar to me as coming out of the mouths of other actors. I believe, for example, that he was the baritone responsible for dubbing Paul Naschy in COUNT DRACULA'S GREAT LOVE. 

I discovered there is a fairly detailed Wikipedia page devoted to the film in German. It includes this interesting (uncredited) sidebar on the film's symbolism: "Striking are the numerous references to Christian symbolism which, however, have been reversed in a manner corresponding to the evil character of Count Regula. Thus, on Roger's journey at the entrance of Sandertal, there is a statue resembling famous paintings in which God the Father cradles Jesus, taken down from the cross, in his arms - the so-called "Mercy Seat." It shows a man with a crown who holds a man with a loincloth and severed limbs - therefore also representing Count Regula. Count Regula wants to be resurrected on Good Friday and seeks to gain eternal life through the blood of thirteen virgins. He is also terrified of the cross. The name of Regula's castle - Andomai - recalls the sound of the term "Adonai," which is Yiddish for 'Lord.'"

It also reveals that screenwriter Manfred R. Köhler's original script title was SCHLOSS SCHRENKENSTEIN, which would translate as "Schreckenstein [Horrorstein or Terrorstein] Castle," and that cinematographer Ernst W. Kalinke broke an arm while filming the forest sequence, after which he was temporarily replaced by Dieter Liphardt. Furthermore, the text offers two quotes from Christopher Lee that I find worth sharing. They were both addressed to his fan club president Gloria Lillibridge, the first in mid-1967, as the film was beginning production: "I have no idea if this movie will ever be seen outside Europe, and that may even be beneficial." And then the second, sent after the filming was completed: ""It was a lot of fun to stay in Munich and I was pleasantly surprised by what I have seen so far from the film. The colors are first class, the sets excellent and the acting performance more than adequate. Maybe the movie is not as bad as I feared."

After sharing an earlier draft of the above with followers of my Facebook page, I was surprised by how many people came forward to say that this obscure-yet-many-named German offering was a film they loved. Author and blogger Charles Lieurance told me that it was actually his favorite horror film. I was surprised by this enthusiasm, but on reflection, why not? It's high praise fairly well deserved. Like SUSPIRIA, Reinl's dark fable is garish yet remarkable, and the darker passages of Peter Thomas' score are enjoyably overbearing much as the Goblin score for SUSPIRIA is.

As far as I know, there is no Blu-ray release of DIE SCHLANGENGRUBE UND DAS PENDEL yet available anywhere in the world. I am aware of the German DVD I mentioned, and another DVD from (I think) a Spanish label whose language tracks are limited to Spanish and Portuguese. All of this points to a definite need for a more definitive presentation on disc, and I commend it to the usual suspects for serious consideration.

(c) 2019 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.






(c) 2019 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

Lost Commentary

Dear Listeners,

I’ve been given clearance by Kino Lorber’s Frank Tarzi to make the following information known at this time: 

Earlier today, if you went to the website of Diabolik DVD, you might have found them soliciting pre-orders for Kino Lorber’s upcoming Blu-ray of David Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY, which will be streeting on June 3. Their description of the disc's contents included mention of some enticing extras, including an hour-long interview with David Lynch, an exclusive booklet essay by Nick Pinkerton, and a NEW audio commentary by Tim Lucas. 

This was the exciting hush-hush project I mentioned on Facebook a month or so ago. The commentary was commissioned by KL and I did the work. I was honored, excited, and also a but intimidated to script and record the FIRST-EVER audio commentary for a David Lynch film on disc. 

I was extremely proud of the result too, which - despite my initial intimidation - flowed out of me like water. Bret Wood, my disc producer, told me the finished commentary was terrific. At the time these extras were planned, Universal seemed to have no problem with them; however, once the work was done (and paid for, I hasten to note), I’m told they checked their contract with the filmmaker and discovered that neither they nor their sub-licensors were allowed to include ANY extras with the release, in keeping with the wishes of Mr. Lynch. 

Therefore, I regret to inform you that - contrary to news that got out earlier today - Kino Lorber’s LOST HIGHWAY Blu-ray will feature NO extras other than a trailer. It’s the way David Lynch wants it. Of course, I’m disappointed that my and Nick’s work won’t be along for the ride - but I’m presently considering other ways of making my commentary available, perhaps as a stand-alone digital upload or in expanded book form. 

I sincerely hope this news won’t spoil anyone’s interest in the disc, which I can promise you is a magnificent HD transfer of a mind-bending film.

Tim Lucas

(c) 2019 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

The Mystery of A. Louise Downe

There has been a fair amount of talk recently about Milicent Patrick, the Universal-International creative designer who was responsible for the look of several of the studio's 1950s monsters, though company policy dictated they be officially credited to Make-up Department head Bud Westmore. Patrick - apparently blackballed by Westmore when the photogenic Patrick was promoted as the creator of the Creature from the Black Lagoon - is the subject of a new book by Mallory O'Meara, THE LADY FROM THE BLACK LAGOON: HOLLYWOOD MONSTERS AND THE LOST LEGACY OF MILICENT PATRICK (Hanover Square Press), and you can read her now-documented story there.

A similar case would seem to concern the woman principally known by the screen credit of A. Louise Downe. In case the name is unfamiliar to you (because she went by many), Downe was an associate of Florida-based fright firebrand Herschell Gordon Lewis (1926-2016), who - at the time of their meeting - was a maker of Sunshine State "nudie-cutie" features. He and she then embarked on the films for which Lewis remains most famous:  BLOOD FEAST (1963), TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964), COLOR ME BLOOD RED (1965), and so on, through 1972's THE GORE GORE GIRLS. In other words, the foundation blocks of "gore" cinema.

So, what was Ms. Downe's role in all this? Well, according to screen credits and published news features of the time, she wrote some of them (including BLOOD FEAST, the one that started it all*), created their horrific special makeup effects, and served as Lewis' assistant director from 1967 through 1972. She was also known to play the occasional bit part. Okay, so if we remove all of those individual duties from Herschell Gordon Lewis' films, what's left? His sterling direction of actors? His mise en scène?

* It should be mentioned that the late Randy Palmer, in his 2000 book HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS: GODFATHER OF GORE (McFarland and Company), quotes Lewis as saying that he actually wrote the script but credited Downe out of noblesse oblige when she came up with the idea of having the cannibal chef Fuad Ramses concoct his "Egyptian Feasts" as a blood sacrifice to the goddess Ishtar. Despite her extensive screen credits on his work, and her high position within his companies, she barely rates another mention in the book.

Furthermore, Downe uprooted her own life (which reportedly included three grown children) to follow Lewis to Chicago when he relocated his business there in the late 1960s. Despite her distinctive position within Lewis' work and evidence of more than a decade of open interaction with the press, she has not been heard from since roughly 1972. It was in a January 16, 1972 CHICAGO TRIBUNE article about Herschell Gordon Lewis by Clifford Terry was appended with a sizable coda (see below) acknowledging Louise Downe as "the 'Sadistic Queen' of the Chicken-Skin Flick" (a reference to one of the culinary ingredients recruited for some of the imagery she had engineered for THE WIZARD OF GORE and THE GORE GORE GIRLS).

When Terry's article was carried by other papers, as soon as immediately and later through April, all references to Downe had been expunged, save for an acknowledgement of her as the author of BLOOD FEAST. After that, she seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. The IMDb claims that she and Lewis were once married, but Lewis - who was married to Margo Ellis from 1979 onward - denied this, pretty much refusing to discuss her any further. Perhaps the most interesting detail of all is that, when their partnership ended, Herschell Gordon Lewis stopped directing movies to focus on advertising, copy writing, direct mail marketing, and writing various DIY books. He would not direct another film until 2002.

So who was this woman, who effectively stopped Herschell Gordon Lewis from directing gore films at the very moment that gore in horror cinema was becoming the vogue?

Unable to sleep last night, I found reference to her while looking for something else and ended up tracing the trail of her public life as far back as the early 1950s, when she was just a schoolgirl. Here is what I found out: Though sometimes identified as "Allison Louise Downe," she was most likely born Alma Louise Downe in the late 1930s. The Downe name is consistent throughout all her nominal reinventions, even though one early newspaper profile lists her parents as "Mr. and Mrs. Fred Camp," so it seems most likely that this was the second marriage for her mother - also named Alma (hence her daughter's nickname Bunny) - who gave birth to her at a fairly young age. It was reported that she was also a cousin of the actor Scott Brady, which would also make her an equal cousin to actor Lawrence Tierney. She attended Coral Gables High School, where she proved herself an exemplary and outgoing young student, serving as Presidents of both the Speech Club and Red Cross Councils, as well as being active in the school choir. She was also her Homeroom Chaplain, as well as a member of the Future Teachers of America and other groups. She graduated Class of '55 and then attended the University of Miami, where she majored in journalism and later psychology, while also studying acting.

MIAMI NEWS, October 31, 1952.

However, between those two educational summits, a lot happened. Bunny - a redhead whose measurements were given as 35-23-35 before her HS graduation - began entering beauty contests. She was named Miss Firefighter of 1953, an honor that won her a free trip to Cuba. She was among those who competed for the 1956 crown of Miss Miami, which could have led to bigger competitions, but won only the divisional title of Miss West Miami. Judging by her frequent appearances in the pages of THE MIAMI NEWS, she was something of a publicity hound, always on hand for attractive filler like answers to questions of the moment ("Are American Girls Too Pampered?") and home recipes. Bunny didn't complete her college education - ironically, considering her later vocation, she had to drop out of pre-med because she couldn't bear to dissect dead animals. A local gossip column from June 24, 1957 mentions her founding a Coral Gables modeling agency called Mademoiselle; then a February 1958 column mention announces the closure of Mademoiselle as its founder took up work as a receptionist at WIMZ. It was in late 1957-early 1958 that she "eloped" with her high school sweetheart Lou Mertz, a fellow journalism major. Popping up in an August 12, 1958 "Merry Go Round" column, Bunny felt sufficiently publicized to offer her space to a more generously proportioned (38-22-35) blonde and brown-eyed friend named Joyce Simpson, whose "greatest wish" was to be mentioned in the column. Her marriage to Lou Mertz didn't last, and she remarried to Petrie L. Thorne in September 1959.

1959-1960 were the years when Florida-based filmmaking came into its own, especially where primitive Adults Only features were concerned. During this period, THE MIAMI NEWS reported that Bunny Downe was working as a model and living at the Gold Dust Motel while making a movie with producer Barry Mahon called NAKED ISLAND. She was quoted as having just "flipped" for someone she met during the production named "Sepi Dubronyi" - who was, in fact, the Baron Joseph "Sepy" De Bickse Dubronyi, a sculptor and all-around adventurer of the arts who dabbled in the film business (including, in later years, DEEP THROAT - in which he actually canoodles with Linda Lovelace)  and claimed such women as Anita Ekberg, Ava Gardner, and Brigitte Bardot among his conquests; he was newly divorced during this period. We may presume that Bunny's second husband fell by the wayside as she embraced the film business and the new acquaintances that came with it, as there is no further mention of him.

According to the IMDb, Bunny appeared in a number of nudie-cuties during this period: Jerald Intrator's NAUGHTY NEW YORK (1959), Barry Mahon's PAGAN ISLAND (formerly NAKED ISLAND, 1961), Doris Wishman's DIARY OF A NUDIST (1961) and BLAZE STARR GOES NUDIST (1962), and A.A. Krovek's BABES IN THE WOODS (1962). She made her first film with Herschel Gordon Lewis in 1962, playing the female leads in both NATURE'S PLAYMATES and BOING-G-G under the aliases of Vicki Miles and Vickie Miles.

With Thomas Wood (aka Rooney Kerwin) in H.G. Lewis' SCUM OF THE EARTH.

By December 13, 1963, the former Alma Downe/Bunny Downe/Alma Mertz/Alma Thorne/Vicki Miles/Vickie Miles was interviewed as Louise Downe in Herb Kelly's MIAMI NEWS column, headline: "Pretty Model in Miami Author of Bloody Movie." In the piece, the Miami native - now living in Chicago - admits to writing BLOOD FEAST in a single week and currently working on a children's script that she hopes to submit to Walt Disney. This screenplay never got made, but that same year, Vickie Miles returned in Herschell Gordon Lewis' GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BARES (1963). She was done with acting by 1966, and knuckled down to writing and working as Lewis' assistant. The scripts she is credited with writing include THE GRUESOME TWOSOME, the Birth Control drama THE GIRL THE BODY AND THE PILL, SHE DEVILS ON WHEELS (script title: THE MOTORCYCLES), and the CLOCKWORK ORANGE-like JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT (script title: THE SMASH-IN). She took a less public approach to authoring ALLEY TRAMP (1968) and LINDA AND ABILENE (1969, scripted as ABILENE '69), but there isn't really a whole lot of story to them.

In the December 1967 issue of BACKSTAGE, Downe's official job description at Lewis' company Creative Communications, Inc. was "production manager,"  second-in-command to Lewis himself. In a March 4, 1968 piece in BOXOFFICE, Lewis referred to her as "creative director" of the company, in charge of its industrial films division. In Ruth Ratny's "Chicago Report" in the March 15, 1968 issue of BACK STAGE, Lewis anticipated that she would "add a dimension of drama to business films which is often overlooked." It was in the aftermath of this advancement that Downe began to be profiled by members of the press. On January 5, 1968, in an article titled "The Teen Counselor Who Writes Those Shocking Movie Scripts," DETROIT FREE PRESS interviewer Judy Rose revealed that Downe held a degree in psychology and had worked as a youth counselor in Florida (!), advising troubled teenage girls (!!). Though reportedly single, she had adopted three children who had become wards of the court, then in their mid- to late-teens. Other reportage from this period and later involves her in projects like SOMETHING WEIRD (1967) and THE WIZARD OF GORE (1970, when it was being filmed as THE WITCHES OF GORE with a different lead actor!), serving as Lewis' assistant, providing the celebrated gore effects, and often speaking to the press to promote them. According to John McCarty and Daniel Krogh's 1983 book THE AMAZING HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS, Louise Downe was also responsible for writing the horrific vignettes staged at the Chicago theater known as The Blood Shed in the late 1960s, which made her not only one of the very few American writers to have worked in the true tradition of the Grand Guignol - but very likely the only woman.

By September 1970, Lewis and Company were making THIS STUFF'LL KILL YA! in Oklahoma under its working title THE DEVIL WORE CLODHOPPERS. Coverage of the production appearing in THE DAILY OKLAHOMAN (September 18, 1970) identified the producers of the film as John Sezonov and his wife "Louise Downs Sezonov." One month later, THE McINTOSH COUNTY DEMOCRAT includes an update about the filming in their October 1, 1970 issue. By this town, the film had its final title - and apparently, though still shooting, it had a known 100 minute running time! The story mentions Allison Downe as associate producer and John Sezonov as production manager, but it closes with the mention that "Ultima Productions of Chicago is owned by John Sezonov and his wife, Bunny." So the Bunny nickname persisted, at least among her friends. For what it's worth, the IMDb lists Sezonov's real surname as Sezanoy - but that doesn't pull up anything in my searches.

Clearly, this was a remarkable individual - evidently born to a broken home, a self-starter, an accomplished student on many levels, an innate communicator at ease in contact with the public and the press, an entrepreneur - and also a complex young woman, someone who was able to engage with social concerns and responsibilities while working in films whose main currency was nudity and violence, both of which she personally provided. She was also, to my knowledge, the only woman to have held an executive position in a film production company in the 1960s - perhaps it wasn't seen as terribly respectable at the time, but the work she wrote and made so deliriously gruesome has somehow survived the test of a half-century of interest, and it continues to be screened to enthusiastic audiences all over the world.

If the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis are remembered for anything today - and most recently, they have been remembered to the extent of a generously annotated Blu-ray boxed set of his restored works from Arrow Video in the UK - it is for their ridiculously quotable dialogue, their absurd premises, and their disconcerting uses of history-making, taboo-shattering, brain-boggling gore. Most of these characteristics (I'll be generous by not saying "All") would fall under the job definitions of Louise Downe. Her name appears on the films, though possibly not representing her contribution in its totality - but why does any discussion of her contribution seem to have been suppressed? Why has so little credit been accorded to someone who, at the very least, was a pioneer in the realm of special makeup effects - and whose work was approximately a decade ahead of her time?

There are many possible answers to these questions, ranging from the professional to the personal. When the CHICAGO TRIBUNE's three-page profile of Herschell Gordon Lewis appeared in THE FORT LAUDERDALE NEWS the same day, its mentions of Louise Downe and her appended interview (see below) were not included. The fuller version of the main article concluded with some bickering between the two as Lewis continually derided the crude ingredients of Downe's gore effects, particularly their use of chicken skin. Downe confided to the interviewer, "You'll notice that Mr. Lewis thinks chicken skin is the Alpha and Omega of gore effects. Take it from me, it isn't. You'd think the motto of this company was 'A bowl of chicken soup will fix you right up!" It's hard to tell if this chiding was good-natured or a real bone of contention, but it certainly seems to have gone the way of the latter. Today, it is not even officially known if the former Alma Downe is alive or dead - or under what name!

Enlarge and read this rare January 16, 1972 interview with the "Sadistic Queen" of Gore - a woman who (as one Facebook friend, Robert Freese, pointed out) "was Tom Savini before Tom Savini" - and tell me her contributions to the film business, and specifically horror film history, don't bear additional investigation. It's history that may even bear rewriting.    

         

My thanks to Stephen Bowie and Mike McCollum for their research assistance.

(c) 2019 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

Recent Viewings

THE OLDEST PROFESSION (1967, Kino Lorber)
Originally titled Le plus vieux métier du monde ("The Oldest Profession in the World") and subtitled "Love Through the Ages," this French/Italian/German co-production is a mixed bag anthology of shorts documenting prostitution as it developed from prehistoric to futuristic times. Kino's BD disc includes both the original French release from Gaumont (with English subtitles), and a kind of recreation of the US release, dubbed into English but using the restored French element and its screen titles.

The first two stories, Franco Indovina's "Prehistoric Era" and Mauro Bolognini's "Roman Nights," are scripted by Ennio Flaiano, Fellini's screenwriter on all of his great works from LA STRADA through JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, as well as Antonioni's LA NOTTE and Petri's THE 10TH VICTIM - and they prove that great directors were essential to his best efforts. These, which respectively feature Michèle Mercier as a cave girl and Elsa Martinelli as an Empress who must present herself as a whore to the Emperor to arouse his philandering interest, are not as compelling as they might have been. Things pick up with Phillippe de Broca's splendidly shot "Mademoiselle Mimi," scripted by Daniel Boulanger (Godard's BREATHLESS and de Broca's standard writer) and featuring Jeanne Moreau at her most bewitching.

When the film was initially released in America in 1968, it was somewhat mispresented as a starring vehicle for Raquel Welch, who does manage to eclipse all of the aforementioned femme stars in Michael Phlegar's "La Belle Epoque," co-written by Georges and André Tabet. Relieved of the responsibility of delivering finished dialogue, Welch - a lady of the evening hoping to hook a rich husband in plump, aging banker Martin Held - plays to the camera with masterful acuity, and the sketch is a delight of recaptured period atmosphere and little piquant details. This episode also features Edgar Wallace krimi-regular Siegfried Schurenberg as Held's brother and banking partner. Claude Autant-Lara's "Today," written by Jean Aurenche (FORBIDDEN GAMES), is a passably amusing story about an aging songstress (Nadia Gray, looking great regardless) and young hooker (France Anglade) who pool their resources to use an ambulance as a "hotel room on wheels" and get themselves into trouble on their first outing.

But all of this is preamble to Jean-Luc Godard's futuristic "Anticipation" (written and directed by him), which is shot in black-and-white with what we might call color accentuations. It revisits his previous feature ALPHAVILLE in that it's set in a future where love is forbidden, meted out by robotic women with erotic specialities - one is played by Marilù Tolo (who, surprisingly for a 1967 film, walks across the screen completely naked from head to shin) and the other, a specialist in literary lovemaking, is embodied by Anna Karina in her last collaboration with Godard. This 40m short - with features a cameo by Jean-Pierre Leaud as a bellboy - is nothing short of astonishing, like ALPHAVILLE conjuring up a future without artificial special effects, and telling the most elegant of stories with surprisingly minimal means. Godard's disruption of this monochromatic scheme with color is one of the great moments in his filmography.  This short is so exquisitely French that I thought it might be the sacrificial lamb for the significantly briefer English version... but the English version of "Anticipation" is not only present but even more visually arresting and experimental. Apparently, Gaumont objected to Godard's wishes to tint his black-and-white footage with various color hues, yet his wishes were respected by the US version, which tint the airport scenes a lysergic orange (perhaps inspiring the look of Fellini's TOBY DAMMIT?) and introduce other color-cues as they are stated on the soundtrack. Some nudity is obscured by solarization and the full-frontal shot of Tolo is snipped out, resulting in a delightful edit that has her now "invisibly" crossing the room.  In short, an uneven but surprisingly essential release.

DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME (2017, Second Run UK)
Chicago-born Bill Morrison is one of the most interesting documentarians working today. His work - mostly in the short mode - returns again and again to the theme of the mortality of the filmed image, and this feature-length picture is no exception.

Unlike his early feature DECASIA (2002), an hypnotic dance of death consisting solely of badly eroded footage that has survived from silent features now lost in their entirety, DAWSON CITY has a similar basis but a more solid documentary foundation. Dawson City is a small town on the Yukon River in northwest Canada that once thrived during the time of Gold Rush fever, and during that brief blink in time, its need for entertaining its people was divided between gambling, prostitution, and cinema. It was not a big enough spot to command new films, and it became the last stop for many silent pictures that were so battered by use that theater owners were instructed by the studios to dump them, rather than return them.

This film, using documentary footage from the time, fascinatingly reconstructs the Gold Rush period in greater detail than I've ever seen, and then brings the story of Dawson City up to date with the discovery of buried silver nitrate prints of numerous recovered "lost" films found as a building there was undergoing demolition. We are treated to numerous excerpts from these works, shuffled as illustrations into the story being told, and it is a sobering reminder of innumerable talents that were once thrown away without any thought of their value to future generations. The first thought that comes to mind with something like this is, "Did they find LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT?" Well, no. However, among the generous extras included with this marvelous set are eight original reels from the Dawson City Film Find, which includes recovered reels from the Thomas Edison Studio, D.W. Griffith, and Tod Browning - Reel 2 of THE EXQUISITE THIEF (1919), and it's remarkably involving.

Second Run's set includes both BD and DVD discs, with bonus director's commentary, complete period newsreels, and other remarkable ephemera that challenge the viewer to dig deeper and deeper.

Since viewing this disc, it's come to my attention that Kino Lorber handles the film on BD and DVD in the States, with most of the other set's extras. (Exclusive to the Second Run set is a new interview with Morrison and his 2018 short film THE LETTER.) The Kino Lorber disc can be found here.

BLOOD HUNGER: THE FILMS OF JOSÉ LARRAZ (Arrow Video US/UK)
I had a hand in this box set, providing an audio commentary to Larraz' first feature, WHIRLPOOL (1969), which here enjoys its first home video presentation in a frankly stunning visual presentation. To speak candidly, it's the weakest film in this set; Larraz had a good sense of pictorial composition and knew from his years as a cartoonist how to build drama and suspense visually, but he wasn't yet familiar with where all the pieces should go. So the film ends with the stunning information that would have given the middle a potent turning point, and opts not to conclude the story under construction. However, in doing so, Larraz threw down a gauntlet that undoubtedly inspired other filmmakers - most notably, Wes Craven with his LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT - to create the horror genre's most nihilistic works of the early 1970s. This seminal quality is also true concerning the film's even more emphatic eroticism, which (for a 1969 feature) exceeds most Adults Only films up to that time, and certainly other recipients of the X rating. (WHIRLPOOL was the first horror film to receive the MPAA's X.) In my commentary, I frankly discuss the film's faults and its seminal values, as well as the critical reception it received.

Larraz' best-known film, VAMPYRES (1973), is handsomely included with a new Kat Ellinger commentary. (The disc does not port over the Larraz commentary from the earlier Blue Underground DVD release, nor its other extras.) Ellinger, who is proficient in Spanish, brings to her talk a greater familiarity with Larraz himself, having read his autobiography, and brings forward many points essential to a correct reading of his work - his dislike for supernatural subjects being of particular relevance, considering the film's ambivalence about exactly who or what its "vampyres" are. In contrast with WHIRLPOOL, its sex elements remain on par but its depictions of graphic horror were quite outrageous for the time, and remain startling. Silent film actress Bessie Love, best-remembered as the heroine of 1925's THE LOST WORLD, had her last screen appearance in the film's tongue-in-cheek coda.

But, for me, the great thrill of this box set is THE COMING OF SIN (1978), a far more fundamentally Spanish film that begins as a mundane story set in the commonplace - a couple leaving on vacation ask a rich, reclusive female neighbor if she might look after their young gypsy housekeeper while they're away - that gradually coalesces and ascends to the level of a mythic entanglement between the hostess, the gypsy girl, and a satyr-like gypsy man who rides nude on horseback through the nearest countryside. The film focuses firmly on matters of money, property, and class yet the atmosphere that is conjured around these firm practicalities is slippery, erotic, and mystical. It builds to a somewhat familiar Larraz finale, but this - with SYMPTOMS (1974, not included here) - is easily his most accomplished work, ideally embodied by an unknown trio cast, and magnificently photographed by Fernando Arribas. The commentary for this one is by Kat Ellinger and her DIABOLIQUE cohort Samm Deighan, and though their talk has a lot of agreement in it, I feel they are both at their best when sharing a track, as each tends to raise the other's game. They note the value of certain painters whose work is presented in the story, and while neither is able to specifically note the fables that Larraz likely drew upon, they know they must be out there - pointing in a necessary direction for further research. They also fully explore the film's horrible past history as a hideously, mockingly dubbed English version known as (forgive me) VIOLATION OF THE BITCH and its hardcore Italian variant that goes by the name SODOMANIA. Please do Larraz and his memory a favor by ignoring this version, which is included.

Remarkably, there is very little informational crossover between the three commentaries, the excellent essays included in the color booklet, and the other supplements, which include cast/crew interviews (one the hilarious story of a WHIRLPOOL extra whose 10 seconds of screen time were parlayed into international fame), a rollicking Kim Newman ramble through Larraz' early filmography, detailed examinations of different versions of the films by Marc Morris, and much else besides. This is a fabulously meaty package and incontrovertible evidence of Larraz' value not only as an important master of Spanish horror, but as a distinctive sidebar of British '70s horror as well.

(c) 2019 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.