Tourist Trap (1979)

A peculiar mix of hillybilly-style slasher and House of Wax, David Schmoeller’s backwoods American romp has enough style, spookiness and outright weirdness to elevate it above a genre that at its time of release was soon to become as tired as the masked maniac in each of these pictures must have been after chasing victims, stringing them up, and managing cunning bouts of engineering to enable the bodies of all the victims to drop onto the final girl at appropriate moments.

Eileen and Woody are driving through the kind of deserted American countryside where it would probably be an awful idea to get a flat tyre, when naturally that’s what happens. Eileen waits with the car while their friends Becky, Jerry and Molly catch up in another vehicle. Woody goes in search of a gas station, only to find himself set upon by a roomful of mannequins that have come to life, as well as an assault of random flying objects, one of which eventually skewers him. The others find a tourist trap waxworks run by dungaree-suited Mr Slausen (Chuck Connors). As the friends are bumped off by either a masked killer or more animatronic dummies it becomes obvious that far from being not all there, there may be more than one person living in Mr Slausen’s head.

TOURIST TRAP has few of the elements that would soon become de rigeur for a slasher picture. It does have a bunch of teenage victims and an older tormentor in the shape of crazy Chuck Connors and his collection of scary masks and animatronic mannequins. It’s never a good idea to trust a man who keeps the body of his dead wife upright in a glass case surrounded by flashing lights and a melancholy musical accompaniment, and in that much our teen heroes deserve their fate. 

But what exactly is their fate? The final scene makes little sense, with final girl Molly (Jocelyn Jones) driving down the highway, presumably having escaped, but in the company of mannequin versions of her friends. It’s strange little touches like this, as well as the whole opening murder of Woody, that makes TOURIST TRAP worth a look. Also of note is the music score by Pino Donaggio, who was kept very busy by low budget US filmmakers in this period. Apparently working on the score to Joe Dante’s PIRANHA at the time of TOURIST TRAP’S shooting, Donaggio was approached by Schmoeller who convinced him to provide a typically lush score with a somewhat peculiar clockwork-sounding main title theme that is evocative of the animatronic devices we are about to see. It’s an eccentric score for an eccentric film and while David Schmoeller worked in the horror genre several more times he never made anything quite as weird or special as this.

The Top Ten Films of 2012

      It's that time of year when everyone seems to be producing lists, and as this is HMC's first year of being fully up and running it's only fair that it gets to join in the fun. Listed below, and in reverse order, are my top ten horror films of the year. The only proviso was that they had to have been either released this year, or seen on the big screen this year, and not as part of a retrospective or revival. 
      Before we go to the list, let's pause a moment to consider the films this year that fit into the broad category I'm simply going to label 'Rubbish'. Needless to say there was a lot of rubbish on the big screen in 2012. The good rubbish - the kind that made me clap my hands and laugh out loud - included marvellously trashy possession thriller THE DEVIL INSIDE and the sharks in a supermarket shenanigans of BAIT 3D. Most of the truly terrible films were confined to film festivals (HIDDEN IN THE WOODS, THE HELPERS, OUTPOST II) but there was some proper trash on the UK cinema circuits as well. Ridley Scott's PROMETHEUS left me entirely cold with its enormous budget and its made-up-as-they-went-along script, but the winner of worst horror film of the year, and indeed of any year, goes to PIRANHA 3DD. Truly one of the most embarrassing experiences I have ever had in the cinema, and one that made me feel sorry for the horror genre and its fans, this was a sequel that lacked everything - taste, style, horror, comedy - in fact everything that its predecessor had plenty of. One of the few films I have seen that has no redeeming features at all.
      But that's enough of the rubbish - onwards with the good stuff!

10      Maniac

      It caused walkouts at Cannes, and for all the right reasons. William Lustig's MANIAC (1980) is a masterpiece of demented sleaze - 88 minutes inside the head of a psychopathic killer (played by Joe Spinell) that makes for very uncomfortable viewing. Who on earth would want to remake a film like that? Perhaps the most startling thing about the MANIAC remake is not that it happened at all, not in an era when anything and everything from horror’s recent history is fair game for a terrible updating (PROM NIGHT, SORORITY ROW and pretty soon SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT) but that it’s actually very good, staying true to the spirit of the original while being very much its own sleazy grim voyage through the mind of a psychopathic killer, seen almost entirely, in this version, through his eyes. Elijah Wood is worryingly good as Frank and his performance is terrifying, tragic, and, I really hope, not career-destroying. I've written about this movie at length in the forthcoming Little Book of House of Mortal Cinema, due out next year. Herein endeth the first of two adverts for that in this column.

9      The Seasoning House

      Still awaiting UK distribution (quite possibly because of the number of cuts that will probably be needed), this year’s London FrightFest film festival opened with THE SEASONING HOUSE, a grim, brutal, bleak British horror film set in an Eastern bloc brothel. It’s the kind of film that only gets watched all the way through by individuals with an iron constitution and really isn’t my sort of thing at all, so I hope it says something that even I thought this film was rather brilliant, and it was my pleasure to be able to tell director Paul Hyett and members of the cast that when I got a chance to talk to them afterwards. There will be a full write up of THE SEASONING HOUSE, and some snippets of my interview with the stars, in The Little Book of House of Mortal Cinema, and I promise that's the end of the adverts.

8      The Aggression Scale

      Premiered at the Prince Charles Cinema earlier this year, and now available on DVD, Stephen C Miller's debut feature is a cracking horror thriller that takes the HOME ALONE concept of gangsters breaking into a family home, only for them to face the psychopathic and resourceful teenage son of the family who scores 100% on a psychiatric scale measuring aggression. Great performances, editing, score, and a lot of gory violence made this one of my favourites this year.

7      The Pact

      One of the most pleasant surprises of 2012 was Nicholas McCarthy's debut feature THE PACT, which kept me guessing and impressed me mightily with some clever and atmospheric direction, an obvious and extremely welcome EuroHorror influence, and a climax where the suspense built beautifully. Highly recommended. Nick is working on his next feature now and I can't wait to see it.

6      The Awakening

      Released late in 2011 but not seen by me until January this year, so it counts, here is my good friend Stephen Volk's atmospheric turn of the century ghost story. Throughly deserving of a place in the top ten, THE AWAKENING kicked off with an opening reminiscent of the beginning of Hammer's HANDS OF THE RIPPER or the BBC adaptation of THE TREASURE OF ABBOTT THOMAS and then took the genteel ghost story route to provide its subtle shivers. There isn't enough of this sort of thing around and there should be a lot more.

5     [Rec] 3

      I got married this year, so how could my wife and I not love this? One of two films on this list that had as many people reviling it as loving it, [REC] 3 wins hands down as the most romantic horror film of the year. A light bouncy tone with plenty of humour meant that those who wanted the same thing again as was delivered in [REC] and [REC] 2 were bitterly disappointed but never mind - the latest set reports from [REC] 4 suggest they'll have plenty of miserably grim apocalyptic zombie horror to enjoy in the New Year. In the meantime Kate and I have the BluRay of this on the shelf and it's already been watched more than twice.

4      The Cabin in the Woods

      If [REC] 3 divided opinion, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard's CABIN IN THE WOODS would have caused a geek war if such individuals were inclined to take up arms rather than a computer mouse or XBox controller instead. Loved and hated in possibly equal amounts, there has to be something very special about a film that causes such admiration on one side and such utter vehemence on the other. I loved it - witty, clever, metafictional, and poking fun at the horror genre in such an affectionate and knowing way I still can't understand how anyone can get upset with this unless they take the genre so seriously that they probably shouldn't be partaking of much of it anyway. Excellent film.

3      Sightseers

      How did that get in there? Sneaking in at number three is Ben Wheatley's properly funny, properly horrific, properly British film of a couple who go on a typically dull British holiday and end up murdering a whole load of people. This is a film for all of us who grew up going on holidays like that, only to end up imprisoned in a rain-washed caravan having to watch CARRY ON CAMPING on a black and white TV set with a bad reception. I loved it.

2      Sinister

      God this was good. As I mentioned in my review earlier this year, I don't think I have been so scared in a cinema in thirty years, and the terror-stricken FrightFest audience were the best to see it with. I can't wait for the BluRay of this to revisit the cringing terror and suspense that this movie was able to rack up. Properly terrifying and worthy of your attention if you haven't seen it already, this would have been the best horror film of the year by a country mile if not for...

1      The Tall Man

      So how does a film I never even reviewed get to be number one? Well for lots of reasons, the main one being that you can't write a reasonable review of this one without spoiling the surprises it has in store, so I'm not going to even try. A massive hit in its native France (under the far more appropriate title THE SECRET) the film suffered from some appalling negative reviews by usually reliable magazines like Rue Morgue (a serious miss there, chaps!) and a title change that had many, including me, thinking it was PHANTASM V. I'm not going to say much else about this other than go and see it and expect to have everything you have been shown at the beginning of the film subverted and turned inside out by the end. My one major intention with House of Mortal Cinema is to bring to light unjustly neglected movies that discerning horror fans should see, and movies like THE TALL MAN, or whatever you want to call it, is the reason this site exists, so it gives me tremendous pleasure (as well as an enormous sense of well being) to give it the number one spot.

And there we are! See you in 2013, when HMC should be up and running again properly, & will hopefully include coverage of the movies shown at February's Glasgow FrightFest (including THE ABCs OF DEATH amongst others).

Happy Scary New Year!!!!

    

Sightseers (2012)

What a marvellous surprise. Despite the tremendous promise of the trailer that was shown at this year’s FrightFest, I was still a bit unsure as to what I would think of director Ben Wheatley’s latest effort. I needn’t have worried. SIGHTSEERS is very, very good indeed, and is the equivalent of such brilliant blacker than black BBC TV comedy fare like the first series of Julia Davis’ NIGHTY NIGHT, or her work with Rob Brydon in HUMAIN REMAINS. In fact the couple in SIGHTSEERS could easily have been a half hour in that show. Thankfully their adventures easily make for a ninety minute feature which is good for us, and good for the reputation of British cinema. There hasn't been anything quite as funny, disturbing, quirky, unpleasant and yet endearing as this on the big screen for as long as I can remember.

Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, who also wrote the script, play Tina and Chris. Tina is the archetypal thirty-four year old woman who has never had a relationship and still lives with her domineering witch of a mother, knitting her own underwear and dreaming of romance in faraway places like Redditch. Chris is a ginger bearded plastics engineer who is ‘on sabbatical’ and has a penchant for caravanning and tram museums. They’ve been going out together (whatever that may mean in their world) for three months, but now it’s a big moment in their relationship: their first holiday together. Their itinerary will include such British tourist standbys as Blue John Cavern, Ribblehead viaduct, and a pencil museum. It will also include a number of murders as members of the general public do tiny things to rile Chris and cause him to do them in in increasingly unpleasant ways. Initially horrified by this, Tina soon starts to get in on the act herself, especially when she catches the bride-to-be at a particularly awful hen party trying to get it on with her man.

It’s rare that a film is actually able to live up to the poster claim of ‘Instant Cult Classic’ but SIGHTSEERS may well be it. It’s a film that encapsulates perfectly a specific type of British holiday and indeed British holidaymaker. Where it scored in spades for me was that it doesn’t shy away from the horror aspects of what is going on.  It would have been easy to make SIGHTSEERS a charmingly quirky comedy about a couple who just happen to kill people. What director Ben Wheatley does for an already splendid script is give it a sense of depth, atmosphere, and realism that means that often you’re laughing at things and then realising you’re properly disturbed by them. Jam packed with quotable lines (“He’s not a person, he’s a Daily Mail reader,” “Every time I find my oeuvre someone shits on it”) SIGHTSEERS is a film whose reputation will grow and grow. I suspect it will do very well in Europe and will either be a fantastic hit or a colossal miss in America, in the same way no-one would have been able to guess how Monty Python would do there.

SIGHTSEERS is really great and I loved it. Writing about it now has made me want to watch it again and I no doubt shall. In the meantime get down to your local cinema and support a bit of homegrown British comedy horror brilliance that we can all be proud of.

Exorcism (1975)

I don’t know what it is about me and the films of Jess Franco. A bit like a woman you know is bad for you but whom you can’t resist, they draw me back time and time again, even though while I’m watching I have a sort of guilty feeling that I should be spending my time doing something far more worthwhile. EXORCISM is a 1975 effort of his that was also know as DEMONIAC in its more horror-orientated ‘unerotic’ form (although I’m not sure you can call the more complete version I have just seen erotic), and came out in Europe under the wonderfully sleazy title THE SADIST OF NOTRE DAME. In fact, like many of Franco’s films, it’s quite possibly had more titles than people who have actually seen it, or at least people who stayed until the end.

A character knocks on a door wearing one kind of coat and then enters the room dressed entirely differently. A girl gets out of bed in closeup only for the long shot to show her getting out of bed again. The camera wobbles, goes out of focus, into focus and then out again. That is, of course, if it’s being touched by a living person at all and not just left in a corner to seemingly randomly record whatever might pass for acting in whichever hotel room has been rented for the purpose. Scenes either begin or finish on close-ups of ladies’ pubes, and when  they don’t there’s a fair bit of crash-zooming in on them in the middle. 

To his critics (of which there are many, including me on the days when I’ve got a bit exasperated with his work) the above is probably a reasonable summary of Franco’s oeuvre, never mind this film in particular. What’s a shame here is that the plot of the film is actually quite interesting, and in the hands of someone capable of taking a bit of time and care could have been a superbly subversive commentary on censorship and freedom of expression.

Franco himself plays Paul Vogel, a demented defrocked priest who writes saucy stories for ‘Venus’ publications. He overhears a conversation between Lina Romay (of course) and her editor about attending a black mass. Actually it’s a saucy show Lina and her lady friends put on for debauched millionaires, and we’ve already seen one over the opening titles (which, by the way, give up and go away before a directorial credit ever appears).  Vogel spies on the show, goes even more mental than he was before, and starts to kill everyone involved, believing he’s doing the Lord’s work because he can absolve his victims of their sins as they die, thus ensuring their passage into heaven. 

I may be damning Franco with faint praise here, but his ability to make attractive naked ladies not at all erotic in scene after scene of  soft core gropiness must require some kind of special ability. What it also does is keep your mind on the plot (and the technical gaffs and mistakes of which there are a few), make you feel just as disturbing a voyeur as some of the audience members in the movie, and also remind you that no matter how bad Franco gets, for some reason he always has the most amazing eye for locations - some of the buildings he picks out for this film are fabulous examples of architectural flamboyance. 

I spend too much time watching Jess Franco films. I probably spend too much time writing about them, too, and this won’t be the last time. But those are my sins and I feel I shall have to live with them. Just as long as some demented priest doesn’t come along to show me the error of my ways.

The Queen of Spades (1949)

It’s time for a bit of class at House of Mortal Cinema. Thorold Dickinson’s film of Alexander Pushkin’s short story is something that had entirely passed me by until it was flagged up on Facebook recently as being a ghost story worth seeking out. It certainly is that, but it’s also an extremely well made, cleverly shot film that’s well worth 91 minutes of any film aficionado’s time, with a couple of turns by future stars of BritHorror to make things even more fun.

Anton Walbrook is Herman Suvorin, a lowly Captain in the engineers of the St Petersburg Russian army of 1806. Obsessed with the card game of Faro (the rules are explained in the film and it’s very easy) he refuses to play unless he can be guaranteed to win. Seeing as Faro is purely a game of chance this seems impossible, until he wanders into what looks like a 1920s German expressionist movie version of an Amicus anthology movie bookshop, complete with devilish-looking proprietor and books to match. He picks up the one about selling one’s soul for gain and reads the tale of how, many years ago, the Countess Ranevskaya (the mighty Edith Evans in 1806 time) sold her soul to win at that very same card game so that the money stolen by one of her many lovers could be returned before her husband found out. The Countess just happens to be very much alive and living in St Petersburg. Suvorin hatches a scheme to make contact with the old woman, but it all goes wrong and she dies as a result. Later he’s visited by her ghost who reveals how to win at the card game but only at a price.

There’s a lot to love about THE QUEEN OF SPADES. The first half an hour is pure gothic horror, the second act may have you wondering if it’s going to get scary again but then it does, in spades (sorry), and by the time the film is over I was wondering why on earth I had never heard of it before. The production design is stunning and, as mentioned above the photography makes many of the scenes feel as if they are from a film shot thirty years earlier. The cast is uniformly excellent, with Walbrook and Evans playing their very best unrestrained gothic. The rest of the cast includes a wealth of faces who would become familiar to Brit Horror fans including Ronald Howard (CURSE OF THE MUMMY’S TOMB), Yvonne Mitchell (DEMONS OF THE MIND), Anthony Dawson (CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF), Miles Malleson (DEAD OF NIGHT & many others), Michael Medwin (NIGHT MUST FALL and lots of British TV) and if you look closely you’ll spot Hammer’s favourite landlord, George Woodbridge (Mr PIPKINS himself) as a footman.

The real star of QUEEN OF SPADES, though, is director Thorold Dickinson, Bristol born and a director of apparently international standing. Some of his framing, camera setups and overlays are just marvellous, to the extent that if they were seen in a film today they might be considered impressive: a shadow ‘ghost writes’ a letter; a spider’s web is superimposed on the face of a female victim about to be ensnared in a trap, and the way in which the ghost’s visit is enacted are all wonderful moments in a movie that rewards repeat viewings. An unexpected treat. 

Bait 3D (2012)

This Australian rip off of SNAKES ON A PLANE should really be called SHARKS IN A SUPERMARKET and who knows, in some territories that demand more accurate titlings perhaps that’s what it’s called. Sadly the line ‘I’ve had enough of these motherfucking sharks in this motherfucking supermarket’ isn’t in evidence, which is a shame, as otherwise it would easily win best trashy movie dialogue of the year. Many of the other elements of David R Ellis’ Corman homage are all present and correct, though, and if you had a thoroughly chucklesome time with Samuel L Jackson and the gang in that, the chances are you’ll have a ball with this too - I know I did.

Xavier Samuel (from THE LOVED ONES, a properly good Australian horror picture) plays Josh, a former lifeguard who, because of some pre-credits shark based trauma now earns a living stacking shelves in the local Oceania supermarket. Life in this supermarket appears to be rarely dull, as all the cliched characters you seem to get in monster movies like this shop there. It’s an especially bad day for Josh because his girlfriend Tina (Sharni Vinson) who left him for foreign shores after he decided to live in a filthy flat and lost his ability to spoon coffee into a mug properly has returned from the Exotic Foreign Land of Singapore (which happens to be a coproducer of BAIT 3D) with her hunky Singaporean boyfriend in tow. Scarcely do they have the chance to exchange smouldering glances across a crowded baking products aisle (Josh and Tina I mean, although the alternative might have been even more fun) than vicious hardened B-movie criminal Julian McMahon is carrying out a one-man holdup, cunningly disguising himself as a customer by wheeling a trolley for all of two seconds before abandoning the subtlety route and pulling his weapon out (I know I know but a film like this positively begs you to have whatever fun with it you can).

Josh’s day couldn’t possibly get any worse, could it? Well before you can say ‘What’s that coming over the hill?’ a MASSIVE tidal wave has swept through the town and the supermarket, submerging most of its quality goods and letting in a couple of sharks for good measure. Most of the cast (I won’t say stars as that would be a bit too charitable) get trapped on the upper floor of the supermarket and have to spend their time jumping from frozen meat counter to frozen meat counter while they try to think up ways to avoid / trap / get eaten by the shark. And oh my do they come up with some incredibly silly ones that I shall leave you to find out for yourself.

Just in case this film isn’t a whole load of enough stupid already there are also a group of secondary characters trapped in the downstairs car park, including the horror standbys Bickering Couple and Annoying Small Dog. Some of the dialogue here is priceless, and I actually mean that in a good way. When a joke about fake Gucci shoes has you smiling while an improbably enormous killer fish ambles past the characters delivering the dialogue you know you’re having a good time with a very silly film.

BAIT 3D is very silly indeed. It is also much, much better than what I was expecting to see. Fans of sub-par rubbish like the recent spate of Roger Corman SyFy movies like DINOCROC vs SUPERGATOR and of course the now immortal drive-in cheesiness of SNAKES ON A PLANE will have a great time with it. I also have it on good authority that a sequel script is currently being ironed out - I kid you not. Apparently BAIT 2 will be set in a school that suffers the same treatment as the supermarket here. On the basis of how much fun I had with original, the makers of BAIT 2: SCHOOL OF SHARKS can have my price of admission right now. But only if they use that title.

The Clinic (2010)

     The opening caption ‘Based on true events’ seems to be de rigeur for many a horror film these days, and it’s all present and correct at the beginning of THE CLINIC, but don’t let that put you off what is actually another pretty decent little Australian horror picture. 

      It’s another film that, like LITTLE DEATHS, I picked up on a whim (this time for £3 at HMV), and was subsequently delighted to discover that it’s actually rather good.

In 1979, (a time before DNA testing, we are rather ominously told at the beginning) a young couple, Cameron and heavily pregnant Beth, are travelling across Australia to visit Beth’s parents for Christmas. They stop for the night at the kind of motel one should never stop at in this kind of film, and Cameron does the stupid movie thing of popping out for some food in the middle of the night, only for his car to run out of petrol. By the time he gets back Beth is gone and no-one admits to her ever having existed.

Meanwhile Beth has woken up naked in a bath full of ice. Her baby is gone and all she has to show for it is a lower midline incision in her abdomen. She pulls on some clothes and goes wandering around what looks like the abandoned meat processing plant she has been brought to and is now a prisoner in. She eventually discovers four other women, all with identical scars, all of whom have just been deprived of their babies under mysterious circumstances. 

Where things take a turn for the fun and horrible is when the women discover the babies alive and well but locked in cages. There is nothing to identify them save a coloured marker. It transpires that the mother of each child has a corresponding marker inside them that was put there at the time the baby was removed. It then becomes a question of how far is each mother prepared to go to discover which baby is her child, and the film quickly becomes a trial of survival of the fittest as the women begin to stalk each other.

What’s extra good about THE CLINIC is that it doesn’t stop there. Once we discover the reason for all this there’s a great twist and an appropriately blood-drenched climax that makes what has gone before all the more worthwhile for sticking with. Nicely directed with some good performances and makeup effects, THE CLINIC is the kind of understated-but-gory and well thought through low budget horror film that we could do with a lot more of. Kudos to all involved here, but especially first time writer-director James Rabbitts who, like John V Soto who did NEEDLE (also reviewed on here) is another Australian horror director who will hopefully go on to even greater things. Another little gem that’s out there at the moment for minimal cash outlay.