Switchblade Romance (2003)

Starting off like so many slasher movies before it, SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE (let’s call it by its English title for the sake of this review, shall we? Especially as it’s a rather better title than what Haute Tension translates as) begins in a farm house in the middle of the French countryside. Alex has brought her friend Marie back from university with her so they can do a bit of revision during the holidays. The law books never get opened, though, because as soon as everyone’s in bed it’s the cue for almost Alex’s entire family to get massacred by a mysterious caller who then proceeds to kidnap her. Marie ends up with her in the back of the killer’s van and the rest of the film details their trip through the French countryside before culminating in a final blood soaked showdown. To say any more would spoil the story for those who haven’t yet seen it, suffice to say the film takes a turn I wasn’t expecting but was extremely welcome in these days of by-the-numbers slasher movies.

The new wave of extreme French horror cinema has tended to emphasise the more grim and miserable aspects of the genre. SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE predates films like INSIDE, MARTYRS and THE HORDE and while it’s no less bloodstained it does have a lighter, more entertaining vibe to it. Having seen it it’s now no surprise to me that while his contemporaries have been exploring the finer points of miserabilism in their homeland director Alexandre Aja moved to Hollywood to direct an okay remake of THE HILLS HAVE EYES and a quite outrageous over the top fun filled extravaganza of a remake of Joe Dante’s PIRANHA. 

As SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE progresses, and particularly as we get into the last twenty minutes, it becomes obvious that this and PIRANHA 3D are the work of the same man. Personally it’s a delight to discover a modern French horror director who wants to entertain at least as much as he wants to mortify. It’s also a pleasure to see Giannetto de Rossi’s name in the credits, his torn throat appliances having come a long way since Olga Karlatos had hers ripped out in Fulci’s ZOMBIE 2. In fact the only thing I really didn’t like about this film was the music, which comes across as one of those ‘sound design’ efforts filled with scraping noises and wobbling base noises when a proper score would have made this even more enjoyable. On the basis of this and his subsequent projects, Alexandre Aja has confirmed his position as the only modern French horror director I would like to actually meet, if only so I can ask him if the J&B gag in this film is a reference to the Italian giallos SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE could actually so easily be a blood drenched, slasher-orientated, over the top tribute to.

Macabre (1958)

If there is one filmmaker in the world I would have liked to have been it’s William Castle, who seemed to have a genuine love of his audiences and most of all wanted them to have a good time. His string of successful horror films included HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, THE TINGLER, HOMICIDAL and MR SARDONICUS, all made with a twinkle in the eye and a gimmick hidden somewhere in the picture. Whether it was a plastic skeleton floating over the audience, electric buzzers wired into the seats, or just the thumbs up / thumbs down poll cards for the villain’s fate at the end Castle fans knew they weren’t just paying their ticket price for a movie but an entertainment experience that might include something along the lines of the above. And it all started with MACABRE. Admittedly the gimmick here isn’t anywhere as near as ambitious as some of his other films. A stern announcement at the beginning tells us that the management is concerned for its audience’s health and if anyone should display signs of undue fright would the person next to them please alert cinema staff in case of emergency. I understand that while nobody actually died of fright and thus was able to cash in on the life insurance policy offered by Lloyds of London, actors would sometimes be employed to sit in the audience of Castle pictures to play the gibbering wreck who couldn’t take any more of the terrors being doled out on screen. Then the film proper starts, and what an odd little picture it is. Veering between film noir and lurid melodrama we begin at a funeral parlour where a child’s coffin has been stolen. Then the nurse who assists the local doctor receives a telephone call to say his six year old daughter has been kidnapped, buried underground, and they only have until midnight to find her. What follows is the most convoluted of plotlines and the most ludicrous of outcomes, but Castle keeps everything moving along breezily so the movie is never boring. There are quite a few flashbacks as well, detailing the reprehensible nature of much of the townsfolk until it gets to the point where you wonder if there’s a single decent person in the script. Much of the film takes place in a graveyard that’s actually remarkably atmospheric for such a low budget picture, and wouldn’t look out of place in a Universal film  made fifteen years earlier. Once the plot has been wrapped up, the villain has died horribly and the world has been set to rights we are treated to an animated end title sequence led by Mr Castle himself and writer / coproducer Robb White driving a hearse as the cast is divided into ‘The Dead’ and ‘The Living’. Stephen King wrote about this film in Danse Macabre (he called it McBare as a child) and said when he finally got to see it he was unimpressed. So I have him to thank for lowering my expectations and providing me with an unexpectedly entertaining evening’s viewing.

Wrong Turn 2 (2007)

One of the wonderful things about this genre of ours is that joy can come from the most unexpected places. Rob Schmidt’s original WRONG TURN (2003) was an okay hillbilly horror movie in which Eliza Dushku, Desmond Harrington and friends encountered a trio of deformed mutants and suffered the consequences. Schmidt went onto direct one of the few episodes of the second series of MASTERS OF HORROR worth watching - Right To Die, and in fact it was that TV episode that encouraged me to seek out his debut picture.

Joe Lynch, on the other hand, (who directed WRONG TURN 2) I met at FrightFest last year where he and his friend Adam Green (HATCHET, FROZEN) were premiering their new drive-in anthology movie CHILLERAMA. Lynch seemed such a personable chap, and so alive with the love of all things Mortal Cinema-esque (as did his colleague, I hasten to add) that I thought it only charitable to seek out what I assumed would be a fairly routine effort.

Far, far better than it has any right to be, you will know if you’re going to enjoy WRONG TURN 2 before the titles have finished when a blonde-haired young lady called Kimberly is despatched in a way so over the top outrageous that it will either be time to switch off the film or settle down for a hillbilly horrorfest of near-crazy proportions.

This time, instead of people randomly lost in the woods the plot centres around a simulated post-apocalypse reality TV show. The participants are introduced in such a deserve-to-die way as to bring a nostalgic tear to the eye of even the most hardened fan of slasher films. What then follows is an exercise in country carnage, with several scenes going over the top in terms of violence. Judging from the way certain scenes seems to have been included simply on the grounds of outrageous bad taste one also wonders if Mr Lynch may also harbour a love for the gleeful excesses of John Waters. In fact a viewing of his CHILLERAMA episode almost confirms it (I’ll leave you to find out the title yourselves).

As well as having a healthy sense of gory fun the cast is peppered with familiar faces from these sorts of things. Both Crystal Lowe and Texas Battle (I suspect these aren’t their real names) appeared in FINAL DESTINATION 3 as the one who dies naked in a tanning booth and the chap who gets his head squished in the gym, respectively. Walter Murphy is the only carryover from part 1, doing his best John Carradine impersonation as he tries to provide some explanation as to why the mutants developed in the first place and allowing Lynch to provide a nod to PROPHECY. In fact there are plenty of homages for horror fans to pick up on, with scenes reminiscent of everything from THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE to TROPIC THUNDER, but in a good way.

So, highly unexpected, highly outrageous and highly enjoyable. Well done Mr Lynch. On the Mortal Cinema shelves lurks WRONG TURN 3, which will have a hard time living up to this one, but only time will tell.

Frogs (1972)

Along with demonic possession movies riding on the coat-tails of the success of THE EXORCIST and THE OMEN, probably the other most popular horror movie subgenre of the 1970s was the ecohorror picture. Movies about nature turning against man, often because of humankind’s scientific meddling, abounded throughout the decade. Despite the attempts of Bert I Gordon (FOOD OF THE GODS & EMPIRE OF THE ANTS) and of course William F Claxton (NIGHT OF THE LEPUS) the main differences between these and 1950s monster movies was that often the animals in question were normal sized. Few were intended to do little else than use some inexpensive animals obtained from the local pet store as a means of providing exploitative thrills. Quite possibly the nadir of the use of animals in this way was the Ted V Mikels-produced THE WORM EATERS but that’s for another time. Or, as anyone familiar with Mr Mikels’ work may be relieved to hear, quite possibly never. One of the first ecohorrors out of the gate was FROGS, an AIP production directed by George McCowan. McCowan spent almost his entire career in television, and his CV boasts mainly episodes of FANTASY ISLAND, STARSKY & HUTCH and CANNON, but he took a bit of time out in the early seventies to direct THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN RIDE! 

And FROGS.

A tiny moment of nostalgia here if I may. The UK quad of FROGS was one of the very first pieces of film memorabilia I owned, and the tag lines ‘Slithering Slimy Horror!’ and ‘If You’re Squeamish Stay At Home!’ screamed out from above a picture of one of the title creatures with a human hand in its mouth much to the chagrin of the rest of my family.

On a private island in some mystical part of America where boa constrictors, rattlesnakes, alligators, monitor lizards and enough frogs to stage a live version of an old Paul McCartney single all live together, octogenarian wheelchair-bound Ray Milland is busy gathering his dysfunctional family around him for a July 4th birthday celebration. Into this unhappy mix floats Sam Elliott in his canoe. Sam’s been shooting some pictures for a magazine article on environmental pollution, which has been a handy way of showing a few shots of bin bags and Coke cans floating around over the opening credits, as well as the necessary fullscreen amphibian visage over which the title itself is imposed to an almighty burp of Les Baxter’s self-performed electronic music score. Elliott gets run over by Adam Roarke’s speedboat and by way of apology gets taken chez Milland to dry out and meet the rest of the family. And lots of frogs. Eventually anyway. Milland’s family includes Joan van Ark who gets to wear the most appalling yellow romper suit ever seen outside of a carry-cot. Milland has lost his handyman and asks Elliott to go and look for him. The fellow was last seen spraying insecticide and so we already know what has most likely happened to him. Sure enough it’s not long before he turns up with his face in a ditch, the victim of froggy revenge. As various members of the household succumb to animal-engineered accidents it soon becomes clear that the wildlife is taking over and the frogs are in charge. Milland refuses to leave the family homestead, leaving Elliott, van Ark and a couple of kids as the last ones standing as they try to escape.

FROGS is buckets of fun. Most of the deaths involve a degree of intelligence and planning not commonly encountered in simple vertebrates. A murder in a greenhouse requires the lizards in question to not just knock over bottles of chemicals but to presumably be able to read the labels on the jars so they know which bottles to smash so the contents mix to produce a lethal gas. As I have already mentioned above, at least one rattlesnake has braved its long journey from its normal desert environment to take part in the Florida-based swampy fun, and the frogs all get so excited they either don’t know which way to leap or the frog wrangler didn’t know which way to throw them. Slithering slimy horror? Oh yes. And wonderful fun, too.

Eyes of Crystal (2004)

Does the giallo as we all know and love it have a place in 21st century horror? Well that all depends. Last year Spain offered us the thoroughly enjoyable, stylish and barking mad thriller JULIA'S EYES (which is reviewed on this very site). A few years prior to that Italy and Spain got together to produce EYES OF CRYSTAL, a police procedural that could be considered a serious giallo (complicated plotting, obscure clues, creatively bizarre murders) without all the daft (but fun) elements of its 1970s precursors (outrageous fashions, terrible wallpaper, J&B, excessive scantily clad pulchritude). Oh yes, EYES OF CRYSTAL (or OCCHI DI CRISTALLO to give it the original Italian title) is definitely a giallo for the 21st century, a sleeker, more polished, more distilled version, if you will, of its predecessors.

            There's a mad taxidermist roaming the streets of an unnamed Italian city, busy reconstituting the doll he keeps having flashbacks to from his youth (along with burning nuns and other Italian standbys) from human body parts. His murder victims are left with the parts he has removed replaced with mannikin limbs and, more often than not, with Latin phrases written in blood on the wall close by. Luigi Lo Cascio is the Young Cop Who Doesn't Live By The Rules (he shoots a rapist in the knee in the film's opening sequence after they have caught him just to show he's a bit unstable) assigned to investigate the murders and work out why people are turning up on the beach minus their legs. Senior policeman Simon Andreu (star of THE BLOOD SPATTERED BRIDE and providing a nice link with the EuroHorror of old) gets admitted to hospital where he lies slowly dying of a brain tumour and seeing visions of him and the killer together when they were boys at the orphanage where they grew up but unfortunately he can't remember the chap’s name until it’s just too late. Lucia Jimenez is on hand as the gorgeous girl who needs Lo Cascio's protection but ends up tied to a rickety old bed in her skimpies as the killer dangles his knife over her. It all reaches a climax at the big scary orphanage overlooking the cliffs near the sea where the killer's identity is revealed, as is his whacked out reason for what he's been doing with all the body parts.

            Extremely stylishly shot, EYES OF CRYSTAL often manages to out-Dario Mr Argento with some of its delicious visual set-ups, and there are so many the movie is worth watching at least twice just to appreciate some of the more subtle visual treats and framing on offer here. A glass eye factory and a climax that relies partly on a homage to a certain Mario Bava film that will have all his fans nodding in appreciation, this really is very good indeed. Director Eros Puglielli seems to have worked solely in Italian television since making this which is a shame, as his eyes would be better employed constructing more stylish visual feasts of giallo for a modern generation.

Sssssss (1973)

Possibly the only film whose title is the same consonant repeated seven times, Bernard L Kowalski’s SSSSSSS comes across as a 1970s version of THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE, substituting snake venom for alligator serum, Strother Martin for George MacCready, and Heather Menzies for Beverly Garland. Good old Strother plays Dr Stoner, who is trying to create snake people for…well, no good reason really. There’s some mad scientist babbling about the next stage of evolution right at the end of the film but until then he’s just your average snake handler come loony boffin doing something daft because he’s obviously got nothing better to occupy his time. His first experiment, Tim, is a bit of a failure and gets carted off to the local freak show. At least, we assume it’s his first experiment, although for much of the movie Strother does spend rather too much time chatting to, and drinking scotch with, a python named Harry, who actually overdoes it at one point and has to be given Alka Seltzer to help his presumably upset snakey tummy. Harry doesn’t expand in the way one might expect a reptile with a simple digestive tract given large quantities of carbon-dioxide containing fizzy water to do but that’s because he has to be killed by evil soccer jock Reb Brown a little bit later on. Not unduly perturbed by this, Dr Stoner decides that the most appropriate method of revenge is to have Reb bitten by a Black Mamba. After all seeing as he’s the only one in the district, and quite possibly the state, to own such a creature suspicion could hardly fall on him, could it? But I’m getting ahead of myself. Because Tim is now a resident at the kind of carnival sideshow that also includes an almost-naked lady cavorting on stage for the benefit of the movie’s trailer (and quite possibly poster art), Dr Stoner has to settle for Dirk Benedict as his new assistant, where he quickly settles into the routine of milking mambas, seducing Stoner’s daughter Heather Menzies, and receiving inoculations to ‘build up his immunity to cobra venom’. Cue lots of shots of shirtless Dirk for those members of the audience for whom the aforementioned dancing girl, and a curiously optically obscured naked Heather, (at least on my print) just will not do.

            Dirk starts to turn green and develop scales while Heather discovers the secret behind the carnival sideshow’s latest attraction. It all ends very bizarrely indeed, with Dirk turning into a King Cobra, begging the question: Why turn people into these things as the next stage in evolution if they already exist…oh, never mind. Dr Stoner goes and has a chat with the King Cobra he already has which promptly bites him, presumably out of jealously. Dirk Cobra gets attacked by a mongoose that has remained in its cage throughout the entire film but finally at the 95 minute mark has worked out how to pick the lock. Heather turns up with the comedy police (at least I hope they were meant to be comedy police) so everything can be shot and Heather can scream and scream.

            As a monster movie SSSSSSS isn’t bad at all. The plot is barmy, but no less so than its 1950s counterparts, and the makeup by John Chambers is pretty good. The snake handling sequences are also very well put together. Bernard Kowalski was also responsible for sweaty deep South low budget AIP pic ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES, but that’s a different kettle of wriggly things altogether.File this one under 'S' for Something Snakey & Silly.

The Reincarnation of Isabel (1974)

Sometimes you wonder about the intentions of filmmakers. Usually it’s easy, and you don’t have to be many minutes into a film to realise that the object is for it to entertain, to move, to uplift, to educate or occasionally (God forbid) to preach.

            But then there are other films, films whose reason for existing we can only guess at. Films probably produced to cater to only the most desperate, rather than the most discerning, of exploitation audiences. But these films, whilst delivering the goods in terms of sex, violence, blood and deviant behaviour, provide them in such an obverse manner that you do wonder what on earth was going on in the minds of those responsible, before realising that you probably wouldn’t like to meet them.

           THE REINCARNATION OF ISABEL (which goes by the title BLACK MAGIC RITES on Redemption’s Region 2 DVD) was made in Italy in 1973 and is meant to be a horror film. I say meant to be because having sat through it this bizarre effort here in the Eurotrash Screening Room at the House of Mortal Cinema, and having given the entire endeavour some serious thought, I still can’t work out what it’s meant to be about, despite the fact that one of the characters spends a good ten minutes totally unsuccessfully explaining the plot at the end. What I can say is that it’s set in a castle, that there’s an awful lot of female nudity, some very poor satanic rituals executed by men in red baby romper suits, and that some of the fashions were probably designed by blind people who had been cruelly lied to about the materials with which they had been provided. Other than that nothing’s very clear I’m afraid. I think the back story is about a witch named Isabel who is put to death for vampirism in the fourteenth century. Her husband thus becomes Dracula, the ‘first vampire ever’ (see – two sentences in and this doesn’t make sense). Despite being staked graphically between the breasts and burned alive Isabel takes ages to die in an interminable sequence that in any other film would generate suspense / allow the witch to curse everyone / show her horrible death, but because this film is this film nothing of interest happens at all.

            At a Big Old Castle there’s an engagement party going on for the girl who is the image of our witch. We’re told that this is ‘500 years later’ so we should be in the nineteenth century but it looks suspiciously like 1972. We are also told several times that Isabel will be reincarnated on the coming of the 25^th moon, although from when is anyone’s guess, and seeing as it seems to only take two and a bit years for her to come back why they’ve waited until 1972 is also a mystery. Girls (and there are lots in this castle) start to disappear and end up naked and dead. This goes on for a bit to justify the movie and then suddenly, at about the hour mark, everything suddenly becomes another film, with the male members of the cast attacking women we’ve never seen before in what look like a succession of hotel rooms. Just when we think the budget for filming at the castle must have run out two naked girls run back to the castle pursued by villagers in a sequence in which day becomes night and then turns back to day again every time the camera cuts from them to the castle. Anyone still with the film at this point then gets treated to the ‘virgin sacrifices’ which are so trippy anyone watching them on a big screen would have needed years of therapy and lot of antipsychotic medication to enable them to cope with reality again. A man with an enormous moustache and sideboards who has been lurking throughout the film with his Donald Pleasance look-alike hunchbacked friend does the aforementioned completely unintelligible explanation and our heroine is saved when she stabs the villain. Having read other reviews of this I think that more than does justice to the plot and I really do wonder what Mr Renato Polselli was on when he made this, even though it couldn’t have been half as mind-bendingly disorientating as the people who gave him the money to make it.