This is the inaugural edition of Odds & Ends, a new capsule-review column collecting brief notes on movies taken throughout the month.
‘Saw II’ (2005), dir. Darren Lynn Bousman
I was intrigued by the pretty good reviews for Saw X, the 10th entry in a torture-forward horror franchise that hasn’t once in the last couple of decades inspired the same kind of wide-scale goodwill. That intrigue has not proven persuasive enough in the last few weeks to lure my ass into a theater seat, though, so the other day I opted instead for Saw II. (I’d only ever seen its predecessor anyway.) I didn’t like the first Saw movie: its miserablism was too self-conscious to create the effect it wanted, and its long line of gross-out torture-trap set pieces got quickly monotonous. This all is also true of Saw II, a movie whose meant-to-convey-hopelessness grey-green overlay and comically fussy editing grate more than they drum up fear. My interest in Saw X has dissipated for now, but who knows: maybe it really is an actually good capitalization on the undeniably scary premise the franchise has in my experience expanded on with only fitful effectiveness. But if there’s anything these movies have taught me, it’s that you might as well bow out of something when you still have the means to.
‘Frankenhooker’ (1990), dir. Frank Henenlotter
Much better than you expect it to be, which I know isn’t saying much, 1990’s Frankenhooker is probably as in on the joke of its absurd premise as it could be. (The movie, an apex for the “this couldn’t be made today” adage from its off-color title alone, thankfully keeps things at a short 80 minutes.) But its concept quickly gets so depressing that you feel a little dirty after watching it. It’s about a burgeoning inventor (James Lorinz) who, overwhelmed with guilt after one of his new creations accidentally kills his fiancée (Patty Mullen), goes so mad that he decides to bring her back to life with Dr. Frankenstein-esque methods. Her body destroyed as a result of her death, he also kills a menagerie of sex workers with a lethal dose of some “super crack” he invents so that he can use their now à-la-carte body parts to give the late love of his life a state-of-the-art new one. You sense the movie somewhat wanting to say something worthwhile about the horrors of female objectification by straight men, but so many jokes are based in what amounts to goofier-than-usual reinforcements of the societal disposability of sex workers that you mostly just feel bad. (I did find the table-turning on the inventor at the end satisfying, though.) I guess this is a lesson in expecting more from a movie released more than 30 years ago called Frankenhooker.
‘The Devil’s Wedding Night’ (1973), dir. Luigi Batzella and Joe D’Amato
This very enjoyable riff on the classic Dracula formula finds Mark Damon playing identical twin brothers searching for a magic red ring said to be somewhere in Transylvania. (One twin wants to uncover the artifact for ethical reasons — i.e., give it to an archeological institution that’ll keep it safely in a glass display — while the other wants the money and influence it will bring him.) The pair gets a big and possibly immovable obstacle in Dolingen (an incredible Rosalba Neri), who seems to lord over the land because she has the advantages of ostensibly having the ring in her possession and being Count Dracula’s widow. It naturally won’t register as a surprise when it turns out she’s not using this cursed piece of jewelry for what most of us would consider “good”; it’s a joy watching Neri make bad as glamorously as she does. Because it isn’t convincing when she’s eventually taken down by these not-very-bright brothers, I can’t accept the fact of this powerful and sexy woman being put in her so-called place. So I won’t.
‘Black Sabbath’ (1963), dir. Mario Bava
Bava’s second of three movies released in 1963 is a horror anthology generous with simulated fog and the woozy colors of ingeniously used stage lighting. Black Sabbath’s three beautiful-to-look-at vignettes — “The Telephone,” “The Wurdalak,” and “The Drop of Water” — are introduced by Boris Karloff, always seeming just moments away from letting out a mad cackle whenever he speaks. (He also prominently appears in “The Wurdalak” as a fur-wearing patriarch who may or may not be bloodthirsty.) The shorts — respectively about a woman (Michèle Mercier) alone at home terrorized over the phone by a mysterious caller, generational vampirism, and a maid haunted by the ghost of a late client she steals from — are proportionately excellent, though “The Drop of Water” particularly stands out with its truly excruciating stretches of silence and well-deployed jump scares. For years strictly a cinematographer before turning to directing, Bava was always a better stylist than a storyteller. Black Sabbath marked the rare occasion for him where both style and substance were commensurately potent.
Catriona MacColl and Carlo De Mejo in City of the Living Dead.
‘City of the Living Dead’ (1980), dir. Lucio Fulci
I’m no closer to understanding what City of the Living Dead is about after watching it a few times, though that doesn’t bother me: I’m never watching a Fulci movie for its logic anyway. Though his penchant for the nonsensical is more tethered to budgetary restrictions and outside interference than anything very intentional, Fulci is a director great at cinematizing the feeling of being inside a nightmare, a state in which you can’t help but be very disturbed by what’s going on even if not much of it has a narrative throughline when looking at it from a 1,000-foot view. The movie is in the loosest sense about the gates of Hell opening and the above-ground terrors related to that. Disparate subplots don’t so much build narrative momentum as contain unforgettably gross images: a woman literally puking her guts out; a controlling father ramming the head of his daughter’s would-be suitor through a power drill; a group of people inexplicably sprayed with a hurricane of maggots. The music in this cursed-feeling movie lurches malevolently, the fog machines are cranked; everything moves in what seems like slow motion but is not.
‘No One Will Save You’ (2023), dir. Brian Duffield
No One Will Save You is a sci-fi thriller adamant that actions do, in fact, speak louder than words: there are only five lines of dialogue spread out across its 93 minutes. It’s a fun, if probably unnecessary, gimmick for a to-the-point alien-invasion movie with good geographical sense aiding its many chase sequences and the benefit of having Kaitlyn Dever, among the best young actresses working today, doing a modern-day reworking of silent-movie shtick as an agoraphobic, shunned-by-her-small-town young woman forced into unwanted final-girldom.
‘The Innocents’ (1961), dir. Jack Clayton
The fun of the exemplary haunted-house movie The Innocents is that we never have a firm hold on whether its main abode is indeed populated with a couple of phantoms with piercing stares or if its governess heroine (an exquisite Deborah Kerr), about whom we know very little, is simply losing her mind, extreme isolation and other mental-health challenges exacerbating an already fragile state. An adaptation of the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw, the movie is near perfect as an exercise in Gothic dread no matter which of its posed realities is true.
‘The House That Screamed’ (1969), dir. Narciso Ibáñez Serrador
Serrador’s hard-to-find psychological horror movie is credited not only for being a pioneer of the slasher movie, but also a forebear to the “bad stuff happening in a school for girls” conceit as seen in films like Suspiria (1977) and Pieces (1982). (A version of this factoid appears early in the movie’s surprisingly lengthy Wikipedia page; I promise that I had already been thinking of the movies invoked before this extra confirmation in addition to works like the previous year’s Even the Wind is Afraid, 1972’s What Have You Done to Solange?, and 1973’s Satan’s School for Girls.) I like The House That Screamed as much as I do in part because it isn’t totally committed to being a slasher. There are a couple of grisly, though mostly obliquely seen, deaths. But this is a movie more chilled by the horrors inflicted by abusive authority (made manifest in a very good Lili Palmer, playing the headmistress), which, the film shows, can do a lot more besides create a culture of fear. One girl employs a version of her headmistress’ cruelties to be the queen bee among her peers; the killer, in a shocking, cruel twist, turns out to be a product of the woman’s unyielding iron fist. The House That Screamed is the kind of movie for whom “chilling” feels the most appropriate descriptor; its ending made my blood go cold.
Perry King and Stefania Casini in Bad.
‘Bad’ (1977), dir. Jed Johnson
The print of Bad available on Tubi looks like it has gone through hell — a visual state accidentally complementing the run-down quality of the narrative. The film is, among other things, about a desperate housewife (Carroll Baker) who in addition to running an electrolysis business from home has a side gig where she hires amoral young women to get deeds of varying dirtiness done for clients unwilling to get their own hands filthy. This committedly mean-spirited movie has the comically burned-out quality of an Alex Cox movie; its absurdities also recall the kind found in the movies of John Waters, just more muted. Though some of the performances — particularly a repressed, perennially stressed-out Susan Tyrell as the only character who seems to reasonably experience emotion — have the winsome winking quality that would make Waters proud.
‘Lurkers’ (1988), dir. Roberta Findlay
Lurkers finds its heroine in a waking nightmare. She’s haunted by a childhood tragedy she can’t make sense of. And she’s tormented, in the present day, by deep-seated feelings that something is wrong — and that that wrongness is connected to the young trauma she can’t deduce — but which everyone around her is adamant is all in her head. “This must be a dream; it can’t be happening,” she tries assuring herself the first time it seems definitive that she’s not just imagining things. In Lurkers, the acting is bad, the sense of drama worse; these are traits one can expect from Roberta Findlay, who never got much of a budget to work with but routinely managed to do something shocking and pretty original with her meager funds. (This was, unfortunately, her last movie.) But the staidness, giving the film a constant feeling of something being “off,” works to the advantage of a movie where our lead’s sense of what’s real and what’s fake only gets blurrier.
‘The Pyx’ (1973), dir. Harvey Hart
It’s easy to appreciate a horror movie that prefers stewing in dread to going for obvious shocks. The Pyx just might be the eeriest, subtlest movie to come in through the door opened and then propped in the late 1960s and early ‘70s by Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973), which got so many horror movies preoccupied with the demonic into theaters. It opens with the death of a sex worker addicted to heroin (Karen Black) who also, we find out, had been involved at the end of her life with a group of occultists. This flashback-heavy film doesn’t really lean with full force into that latter narrative thread until its very end; before that, it wavers between being a dry police procedural and an affecting story of a woman having a hard time whose attempt to get out of it doesn’t work out the way she’d hoped. It’s a more sad than scary movie, elevated by Black’s lived-in work. This is the sort of movie where the light at the end of the tunnel is actually a trap you can’t get out of.
‘The Fan’ (1982), dir. Eckhart Schmidt
The Fan would work well as a double feature with Angst (1983): both are European horror movies released within a year of each other forcing us to see the world from the perspectives of people we’d rather not. In the case of Angst, a serial killer pouncing on his next batch of victims, for The Fan a teenage girl (Désirée Nosbusch) increasingly obsessed with a conventionally dreamy matinee idol (Bodo Steiger) whose delusionally idolatrous love will mutate homicidally. Eckhart Schmidt writes and directs with this-is-how-it-happened straightforwardness; his unintrusive cameras grin and bear it as its unstable lead character inches closer to a point of no return. One gets so used to the heightened quality of horror movies that the profound unpleasantness of films like Angst and The Fan — which take plausible scenarios and dramatize them with unflinching verisimilitude — can feel surprisingly vital, approaching the genre with an uncommon dose of literalism. Though its murderous outcome is, of course, an anomaly, The Fan feels especially fresh today, with technology enabling pop-star fandoms to be more aggressive and more mobile in their aggression than ever.
Peterson Reviews 