Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970)

Posted on June 23, 2013 at 8:23 am by Jeff Kuykendall

John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth) is handsome, seductive, and constantly surrounded by beautiful women – in bridal gowns. His Paris-based studio designs wedding dresses, and he lords over his models like a sheik in his harem. His wife Mildred (Laura Betti, Teorema) has become shrewish in her intense jealousy and resentment, and to John she’s just as heavy a burden as that detective, Inspector Russell (Jesús Puente), who keeps dropping by unannounced, asking probing questions about the women in Harrington’s circle who’ve gone missing. Meanwhile, Harrington, who narrates Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970), calmly informs us that he’s a madman. He’s been murdering women before their wedding day, then feeding their bodies to an incinerator, which issues black smoke through a tall chimney. With each murder, Harrington – who frequently retreats to his childhood room, kept intact like a museum piece, replete with wind-up toys and a model railroad – begins to unlock repressed memories from his youth. He actually sees his younger self standing nearby and watching while he attacks with his shining meat cleaver. And images return to him from the past – the sight of his mother being murdered, something he witnessed, something he wishes to solve no matter how many women he has to kill to reveal the clues hidden in his unconscious mind.

John Harrington poses one of his potential victims in his private, mannequin-filled studio.

Story originality isn’t a major strength of Mario Bava’s Hatchet for the Honeymoon, an Italian/Spanish co-production which obviously builds upon Psycho and Peeping Tom (1960) – Harrington even commits one murder while wearing a dress and lipstick, Norman Bates-style – but also recalls Buñuel’s The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955), René Clément’s Purple Noon (1960), Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black (1968), Poe’s “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and any number of gialli that preceded it: it comfortably fits into a long and rich tradition of stories told by murderers attempting to cover up their increasingly sloppy crimes. The “twist” ending – when Harrington finally unlocks the full memory of his mother’s murder – is really not a twist at all, since we can see it coming almost as soon as that narrative element is introduced. But Bava is using this most basic template to play with all his cinematic toys, like Harrington in his childhood playroom. Hatchet for the Honeymoon is a sensory experience, almost completely subjective, wedding itself with real commitment to its mad narrator’s point-of-view. When he prepares to commit murder, Bava cuts quickly between the present and the past, with disorienting shots of the meat cleaver being lifted, in an appropriate cinematic representation of psychotic delirium.

Harrington (Stephen Forsyth) at the incinerator.

Bava not only directs, he takes the title of director of photography, which allows for some interesting experimentation, such as one squirm-inducing shot in which we see a shaft of light upon Harrington’s eye, his face in darkness, then disappearing entirely – until it suddenly leans out of the dark and toward the camera in extreme close-up, as though he’s crawled out of the screen and is now right up against us. The blood-red glow of the incinerator is appropriately hellish, to contrast with the lush, Eden-like gardens of Harrington’s estate. Midway through the film, Harrington finally turns his weapon against his wife Mildred – he serves it up on a silver platter. Her body is one that won’t easily disappear, a point Bava delivers with evident pleasure. While her corpse is sprawled upon the stairs, below Harrington greets Inspector Russell and the angry groom trying to locate his missing bride. Bava films Mildred’s dangling, bloody hand from every angle, all to frame the moment the audience is anticipating: droplets of blood falling from her fingers, down toward the unwelcome visitors and smacking against the carpet. It’s truly worthy of Hitchcock.

The maid pours a drink for the ghost of Harrington's wife.

Even when she’s been fed to the furnace, the ashes poured into a leather carrying-case, Mildred will not go away. She begins to haunt her husband, but – in a reversal of the usual cliché – she can be seen more often by others than by Harrington. Unlike his other victims, she refuses to go missing: everyone can see her at his side, even when he cannot. Defiant, he carries the bag with her ashes to a dance-club. When he tries to pick up a go-go dancer, she objects that he already has a woman at his table, though he sees only the pouch; undisturbed, he suggests a three-way (and is slapped). When we do see the ghost, actress Laura Betti is given grayish make-up and lit in such a way as to resemble the specter in Bava’s Kill, Baby…Kill! (1966) – though nothing is as disturbing as Betti’s smug and satisfied expression. Bava visually makes clear the film’s ultimate message: that Harrington can murder as many brides as he likes, but his own wife will never leave him – adding an element of black humor to the film’s final scene. The score, by Sante Maria Romitelli, may sound dated, but provides a nice counterbalance with its overtly romantic theme, and the opening credits, impressionistic images of Forsyth’s face beneath blood-red paint-strokes, sets the mood for vintage Bava. Available in an attractive Blu-Ray from Redemption/Kino, with an audio commentary by Bava scholar Tim Lucas.

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Night of the Demon (1957)

Posted on June 22, 2013 at 10:59 am by Jeff Kuykendall

“The paper was narrowly examined. As Harrington had said, the characters on it were more like Runes than anything else, but not decipherable by either man, and both hesitated to copy them, for fear, as they confessed, of perpetuating whatever evil purpose they might conceal… [They were] firmly convinced that it had the effect of bringing its possessors into very undesirable company.” -M.R. James, “Casting the Runes”

Well, they don’t get much better than 1957’s British classic of occult horror, Night of the Demon (released in the U.S., slightly truncated, as Curse of the Demon). Though the end result would leave the director, the great Jacques Tourneur, frustrated that his product had been compromised by producer Hal E. Chester (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms), over the decades the film’s reputation has risen, and it’s now widely regarded as a triumph of the eerie. Screenwriter Charles Bennett (The 39 Steps) adapted a short story from M.R. James, “Casting the Runes,” first published in the British author’s 1911 collection More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. To this day, James is better known in his native country than in the United States, despite the fact that his unsettling supernatural tales – often involving scholars whose research and curiosity uncovers vengeful spirits – had a great influence on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft; for a good while the BBC had an annual tradition of adapting one of his ghost stories as a Christmas special. Chester purchased Bennett’s screenplay and polished it; Tourneur was hired to direct; and, as was so common in British B-movies of the day, an American star was imported to help sell the picture in the States: Dana Andrews. The participation of Tourneur and Andrews is key to the film’s uniqueness. Andrews had starred in all kinds of pictures, including William Wyler’s seminal postwar film, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), but he frequently essayed the hard-boiled, straight-talking tough guy in films like Laura (1944) and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950). Tourneur had directed three now-classic horror films for Val Lewton (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man), but also one of the essential film noirs, Out of the Past (1947). Bringing their names to the project guaranteed this would be no ordinary horror picture, but would be rich with noir cynicism, atmosphere, and dread.

Dr. Holden (Dana Andrews, right) visits Lufford Hall, where the warlock Karswell (Niall MacGinnis) puts on a Halloween magic show for the local kids.

The plot is significantly expanded from the more anecdotal short story, though it is faithful to the premise. Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis, later to play Zeus in Jason and the Argonauts) is a proud practitioner of black magic, whose followers fear him so much that they’ve funded his luxurious and sprawling estate, Lufford Hall. In the original story he’s the author of a treatise about magic who takes supernatural revenge against the publisher who rejected him (something to which any writer can relate); here he’s at war against anyone who would try to prove him a fraud. An opening sequence depicts his enemy, Harrington (Maurice Denham, who provided voices for 1954’s animated Animal Farm), chased out of Lufford by a snarling demon that materializes in a fog from the treetops. His mysterious death leads his niece, the beautiful Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins, star of another classic noir, 1950’s Gun Crazy), to get in touch with a psychologist and professional skeptic who seeks to expose and debunk Karswell, Dr. John Holden (Andrews). She soon becomes convinced that Holden will share her uncle’s fate, and believes Karswell’s threat that he will die at “ten o’clock on the 28th of this month,” three days from now. Holden isn’t persuaded of Karswell’s powers, even though the man seems to perform some rather impressive tricks. At a Halloween party on the Lufford grounds, Karswell – wearing clown makeup to entertain children from the local village – seems to summon a spontaneous and violent storm. Later in the film, when Joanna persuades Holden to break into Lufford Hall late at night, a small cat transforms into a leopard and attacks him, then reverts to its original form when Karswell enters the room, switching on the lights. Karswell is all too eager to take ownership of the unearthly happenings that seem to occur. “You said ‘do your worst,'” he casually tells Holden, “and that’s precisely what I did.”

Karswell's mother (Athene Seyler, right) helpfully orchestrates a séance for the benefit of Dr. Holden.

Holden discovers a parchment containing runic writing, which evidently Karswell passed him without his knowing. The paper flies out of his hand and nearly burns in the fireplace, but is caught in the hearth’s screen. All signs seem to indicate that he’s been saddled with a Satanic curse, but he’s unable to decipher the runes on his own (the writing matches that which is etched upon the monoliths at Stonehenge, in an effective use of location shooting). He reluctantly accompanies Joanna to a séance orchestrated by Mrs. Karswell (Athene Seyler), in which a medium named Mr. Meek (Reginald Beckwith) goes into a trance, and his voice transforms as he summons first his spirit guide, then a handful of ghosts before arriving at the late Mr. Harrington. Harrington recounts his own death, and at one point screams, “It’s in the trees – it’s coming!”, dialogue which horror buff Kate Bush would famously sample on her Night of the Demon-inspired 1985 single, “Hounds of Love.” Holden, like Harrington, is ultimately chased by a fog that appears in the trees – and footprints that sink into the ground from the weight of some invisible beast, a la Forbidden Planet‘s Monster from the Id. When Joanna falls victim to Karswell’s mesmerism and taken hostage aboard a train, Holden decides he must set aside his skepticism and slip the cursed runes back to its original owner before the hour of his foretold death – a maneuver that would save his life and destroy the evil Karswell.

The fire-demon summoned by the ancient runes.

Charles Bennett’s screenplay has some rich dialogue, with most of the great lines going to Dr. Karswell. When he regards the old board game Snakes & Ladders, he remarks wryly to Holden, “I always preferred sliding down the snakes to climbing up the ladders.” MacGinnis’s performance is marvelous, anticipating in many ways Charles Gray’s Mocata in The Devil Rides Out (1968). He is eager to prove his intellectual and magical prowess; and his evident embarrassment at his mother’s accommodating attitude toward his enemies (“I only wanted to show [Joanna] your books; I know how proud you are of them”) adds an element of sublime humor. But it’s the mixture of the occult and noir which makes the film so irresistible. Andrews could be playing his detective from Laura, now out of his depth as he takes on the supernatural. This genre fusion is highlighted by a late-film sequence in which Holden questions a man placed under hypnosis: while the subject speaks of the deadly powers of the runes, the bright glow of the lamp placed between the actor’s face and Holden’s summons the familiar atmosphere of a police interrogation in a crime picture. Tourneur also seems to be importing visual motifs from the land of Val Lewton. He adds some unexpected chills with a simple scene in which Holden gazes both ways down a dark hallway; I was reminded of the Lewton-produced, Mark Robson-directed The Seventh Victim (1943), which also deals with Satanism in a noir setting, and has its own dreadful dark halls. (Some of the spookiness can be credited to production designer Ken Adam, pre-Drs. No and Strangelove.) But Tourneur was unhappy with the finished product, since the show-everything shots of the fire-demon were inserted at the behest of producer Chester. They’re certainly out of character for Tourneur, who practiced, in the Lewton school, the tricks of suggesting more than you show (Cat People being a master course in the subject). It would be simple enough to assemble an edit of the film without the graphic shots of the human-mauling demon…and yet, the close-ups have become so iconic that they now feel sacred, in pop-culture hindsight. Night of the Demon actually earns its monster, because it’s taken such pains to ground the otherworldly in the gritty land of noir, lending credence to Joanna’s suggestion that “You could learn a lot from children. They believe in things in the dark, only we tell them it’s not so. Maybe we’ve been fooling them.”

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Lifeforce (1985)

Posted on June 15, 2013 at 4:25 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

Earlier this year Chicago’s Music Box Theatre hosted the “70mm Festival,” projecting in gorgeous 70mm prints of Vertigo (1958), West Side Story (1961), Lord Jim (1965), Playtime (1967), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), Hamlet (1996), The Master (2012), and, of all things, Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce (1985), crashing the party with a sword for slaying topless space vampires. To me, that’s a well-rounded lineup: a Hitchcock, a Kubrick, a musical, a children’s matinee, a Jacques Tati classic, a couple of modern films, and a Golan Globus epic under their notorious “Cannon Group” banner, the same company that brought us Hercules (1983). I first watched Lifeforce as a teenager, perhaps expecting it would be another low-budget 80’s Alien rip-off, like so many of those VHS tapes in that section of the store. I certainly wasn’t expecting an overambitious spectacle with plentiful (and often first-rate) special effects, bizarre makeup, copious nudity, gore, Captain Picard, and all of London descending into rampaging madness. It was as though I were the film’s protagonist, and that VHS tape were the vampire seductress reading my post-pubescent mind and delivering all the R-rated monster movie mayhem I wanted. But here’s the thing: I took the film’s themes very seriously. I drew a Lifeforce comic book and wrote a short story inspired by it. To my young, developing imagination, Lifeforce wasn’t just a big-budget exploitation movie. When Steve Railsback’s Texan astronaut expresses bafflement that he should be so drawn to this soul-sucking alien in her umbrella-shaped spaceship, I was sympathetic, because of my own confused longings and frustrations: I was just as helpless in the presence of girls, after all. I’m much older now, and it’s easier to see Lifeforce for the wondrous trash that it is, just as it’s clearer to me that the film’s ideal audience is teenage boys. They are the only ones who could possibly take this seriously.

A space shuttle crew uncovers a spaceship hidden inside the tail of Halley's comet.

I wasn’t surprised, revisiting Lifeforce on the new deluxe Blu-Ray from Shout! Factory’s horror line, to find that the film was just as wild as I remembered it. Given all the crazed, disparate elements it tries to fold into a single plot, how could it fail to live up to my memories? What continues to fascinate me is that a film of this nature has this particular pedigree. Tobe Hooper had a tremendous mainstream hit with his Spielberg-produced Poltergeist (1982), but signed up with Cannon for Lifeforce, then, in 1986, both a poorly-received remake of Invaders from Mars (again: as an undiscriminating youth, I liked that movie), and an obligatory return to the property that made him famous, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. That poorly-received trilogy for Golan Globus seemed to permanently distance his name from Hollywood’s A-list. Still, with Lifeforce he had some sophisticated toys to play with, including special effects by John Dykstra (Star Wars), a cast with some pleasingly recognizable faces, a score by Henry Mancini of The Pink Panther and Breakfast at Tiffany’s fame, and a script co-authored by Alien‘s Dan O’Bannon. In other words, Lifeforce is a one-of-a-kind film, with a slick veneer and some real talent in service to a silly story that’s unabashedly lowbrow – so no wonder that its stock has risen in recent years, to the extent of its revival bookings and now this extras-loaded Blu-Ray.

An autopsy is interrupted when one of the vampires' victims proves he has some "lifeforce" left.

The key ingredient to the film’s particular sensibilities might lie with the screenwriters. Don Jakoby would later pen Arachnophobia (1990) and John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998). O’Bannon will always be associated with Alien, but his particular sense of humor and outré taste might be better represented by the horror-comedy The Return of the Living Dead, which he directed and which was released the same year as Lifeforce. They were tasked with adapting the Colin Wilson novel The Space Vampires, but they borrow little more than Wilson’s basic concept. Despite what I thought in my adolescence, Lifeforce does not take itself very seriously. Though the dialogue is delivered straight-faced, and, in the case of Railsback, dialed up as much as possible (he was best known for his convincing performance as Charles Manson in 1976’s Helter Skelter), this is a film which knows that it’s essentially about naked, body-hopping space vampires who turn people into zombies. The film opens, rather breathlessly, aboard the space shuttle Churchill, populated with a joint British and American crew and in rendezvous with Halley’s comet. Within the first few minutes of the film, they’re already leaving the hatch and floating into the long alien craft they’ve uncovered drifting in the comet’s tail. The ship’s inside reminds of H.R. Giger’s designs for Alien, so we’re in comfortable, if very derivative, territory. Within they discover the dried-up bodies of bat-creatures, along with transparent, coffin-like vessels containing the bodies of naked – and beautiful – humanoids. They take three for further study, two men and a woman, but some unspecified disaster occurs, and it’s a Churchill with a scorched interior that’s intercepted as it drifts toward Earth, with the aliens – dead or slumbering – the only things left untouched by fire. Before she can be autopsied, the female (a gorgeous Mathilda May) comes to life, seduces a lab assistant, and drains his body of its “lifeforce,” leaving only a dessicated husk. This leaves the dignified Dr. Fallada (Frank Finlay, The Three Musketeers) to declare, “A naked girl’s not going to get out of this complex.” A few minutes later and that naked girl’s shattering windows with her mind and strutting out of the building across broken glass.

Astronaut Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback) interrogates the spirit of the space vampiress inhabiting the body of Dr. Armstrong (Patrick Stewart).

By the time Colonel Caine (Peter Firth, Tess) arrives to seize control of the situation, the alien has left multiple dried-up bodies that violently explode into dust, and, to cover her tracks, has hidden her original body and deposited her consciousness inside another person. Or, as Caine ominously states: “Now she has clothes.” The male aliens also awaken, but are blown to pieces by some security guards who are awfully quick to resort to grenades. A lead arrives in the form of Churchill‘s only human survivor, Col. Tom Carlsen (Railsback), who left the shuttle in an escape pod after the vampires drained his crew and he set fire to the cargo in retaliation. They quickly learn that Carlsen has a psychic connection with the female alien, the result of her lending him some of her own lifeforce. With this talent, he’s able to lead them to her latest hiding place, an asylum for the criminally insane led by the serene-faced Dr. Armstrong (Patrick Stewart), whom Carlsen fingers as the vampire. All this culminates in a scene set in a helicopter, in which blood streams out of Stewart’s face to form the hovering shape of the vampiress, who calls Carlsen’s name before spilling back into a red pool on the floor. Having lost their prey, they return to London, only to find that the vampires’ plague has spread, creating thousands of homicidal zombies running through the streets while the alien craft, having finally reached the Earth, beams up captured souls via a bright blue ray. While Carlsen follows his destiny to join his body with the girl’s – for we’ve by now learned that she’s the ideal physical representation of his feminine side, or something-or-other – Caine takes Fallada’s advice that the creatures can only be slain by staking them: not in the heart, but just a few inches below it, through the center of the lifeforce. He takes up a sword and charges through downtown London, which now looks like a Thriller video, killing zombies and bat-creatures where he may.

The finale has some nifty stop-motion animation for the alien bat-monster.

Inspiration for this finale seems to be drawn from Quatermass and the Pit (1967), the third and best of Hammer’s Quatermass cycle. The naked vampiress also recalls Hammer’s erotic Karnstein trilogy (The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire, and Twins of Evil), and other similar films from that period. Carlsen’s struggle against the life-draining aliens aboard the space shuttle is equal parts Planet of the Vampires (1965) and Queen of Blood (1966). Surely Hooper, O’Bannon, and Jakoby were conscious of all these influences, even as they mixed them into a delirious, Ken Russell-style spectacle. To the film’s credit, it avoids contemporary trappings, and is now dated only by some of its effects, in particular the awkwardness of the mechanical puppets, though these hand-crafted creations from the pre-CG age also add to the film’s goofy charm. In particular, one brief sequence involving stop-motion animation – as one of the male aliens reveals his true, bat-like form – is bound to be please genre fans. Lifeforce was largely derided upon its release, but in hindsight it’s a delightful rarity, a kind of live action Heavy Metal, an explosion of an adolescent Id, more undiluted, and given far more money and talent, than these sorts of efforts are usually allowed.

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