Hysteria (1965)

Posted on February 17, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Throughout the 60’s, Hammer Films produced bucketfuls of suspense thrillers which had nothing to do with Dracula, Frankenstein, or The Mummy. The typical example would be black-and-white, overstuffed with twists, and written by Jimmy Sangster. More often than not, someone would be trying to drive someone else insane, until the victim turns the tables. Their sameness is largely due to Sangster’s love of the Henri-Georges Clouzot classic Les Diaboliques (1955), and if you saw one or two of them, you saw them all. Still, though only a few of these thrillers were truly distinguished (Scream of Fear, aka Taste of Fear, is a personal favorite), all were blessed with the horror studio’s classiness. They were perfect examples of Hammer’s ability to create a quality product on a shoestring budget. Just by glancing at the title, one would assume that Hysteria (1965) could be grouped will all those others: Maniac (1963), Paranoiac (1963), Nightmare (1964), etc. But this particular Sangster-scripted thriller is a little different, and it makes a world of difference in separating it from the pack. Clearly, the influence is less Les Diaboliques than the American film noirs of the 40’s.

X, the unknown: "Chris Smith" (Robert Webber) searches for his identity in a vacant apartment in "Hysteria."

The plot bears a certain resemblance to the great Joseph L. Mankiewicz noir Somewhere in the Night (1946); both use amnesia as the central plot device. Robert Webber (12 Angry Men) plays the man without a past, the victim of an auto accident who now calls himself “Chris Smith.” An American abroad, he stumbles through England trying to find clues to his identity, taking guidance from the doctor who treated him (Anthony Newlands), his attractive nurse (Jennifer Jayne), and an anonymous benefactor who lends him a luxury apartment in London and some spending money. Smith hires a shady private detective (Maurice Denham), and searches out the mysterious woman in a photograph he was carrying with him in the accident, the only clue to his past. The photographer informs him the woman was brutally murdered, but then Smith catches a glimpse of her in the street. His nights in the apartment become restless. He overhears a couple arguing next door, and possibly a killing; when he explores the empty rooms, he finds a running shower and a bloody knife lying on the floor, but nobody in sight. Each night he hears the same voices from the empty apartment, the same heated conversation, and begins to wonder if he’s losing his mind – a possibility raised by the private detective, who abruptly drops the case. Then the woman in the photograph (Lelia Goldoni) shows up at his door, offering to help him.

Dr. Keller (Anthony Newlands) treats the tortured Smith.

Even this late in the game, when Hammer had established a reputation of its own, it still occasionally looked to American stars to headline its films, helping secure distribution in the States. Thus the casting of Robert Webber – though this is the rare case in which this cynical strategy works in favor of the film. Unlike Brian Donlevy in the first two Quatermass films, or Macdonald Carey in These Are the Damned (1963), Webber is a perfect fit for Hysteria, and enjoyable to watch throughout. Essentially he’s a film noir archetype: the wisecracking, emotionally-guarded lone wolf that Dana Andrews and Humphrey Bogart were so good at playing in the 40’s and 50’s. (There’s a nice moment between Webber and Jayne as they study the glamor photograph: “I may have been married to her,” Webber says, deliberately cuddling in close to Jayne. “Something tells me you’re not the marrying kind,” she carefully responds.) If Chris Smith’s journey took him on a journey through London’s seamy underbelly, we might have a late-noir classic here, but Sangster does, eventually, move back to the more familiar, comfortable territory of red herrings and absurdly elaborate conspiracies that were his trademark contributions to Hammer’s suspense thrillers. Still, sharp dialogue is maintained to the very end, with appealing performances from the supporting cast, particularly Denham’s private detective, who proves to be tougher than he looks. Don Banks provides a jazzy score, and Freddie Francis directs, with his gift for drawing out every ounce of the eerie with eye-popping black-and-white photography. The film is available on DVD from the Warner Archives.

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The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984)

Posted on February 15, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

To any teenage boy growing up in the 80’s, this was “the one in the video store with the four-breasted woman on the cover.” Since this came from Roger Corman’s New Horizons Pictures, he would make damn sure there was a four-breasted woman in the movie, too; one suspects the poster, per usual, was designed before the film was made, so the pitch would be, “All we need is a four-breasted woman and David Carradine holding a sword, and we’ve got an audience.” The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984) came at the crest of a wave of sword-and-sorcery B-movies, many of them R-rated, attempting to capture both the savagery and the pulpy sensationalism of Conan the Barbarian (1982). It was a simple formula, but strangely elusive; even the official sequel to Conan felt like one of the original’s cheapie rip-offs (for that matter, this goes for last year’s remake, too). A fine cross-section of the subgenre is offered in Shout! Factory’s two-disc set Roger Corman’s Cult Classics: Sword and Sorcery Collection, which includes the prototypical Conan cash-in, Deathstalker (1983), as well as Barbarian Queen (1985), Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans (1987), and this film, David Carradine’s magnum opus. The films typically featured Boris Vallejo poster art of oiled-up, bodybuilding cheesecake, like the cover of an 80’s Savage Sword of Conan magazine – the actors themselves never looked quite this pumped. Sets and footage from previous films could be recycled liberally, as well (Deathstalker II, for example, not only shamelessly steals footage from Deathstalker, but even, as a wink to the viewer, the “old dark castle” shot from Corman’s old Vincent Price movies). But here’s the thing: despite all the shortcuts and snake-oil, exploitation films of this era knew how to entertain. They had sets, costumes, and extras. They usually had a name actor in the lead role, to rope in viewers. They shot on film, which was an expense. Sure, the end result was variable, but on the whole they put many of today’s straight-to-Netflix-streaming B-movies to shame.

On a desert world with two suns, Zeg (Luke Askew) perpetually wars with his rival Bal Caz (Guillermo Marín) for control of the city's only well.

So here we have a lowbrow epic, the kind of exploitation movie we don’t often see anymore (outside of Uwe Boll, I suppose). You don’t need to look that closely to see that director John C. Broderick is maximizing his limited resources, and that effort, at least, is impressive. Shot in Argentina as an Argentinean co-production, there is one large set built for the walled city, a well in its center; this is all that’s needed for most of the sequences, since the plot centers around that well. The town square isn’t huge, so if you pack it with extras, you can convincingly create the idea of two armies warring for ownership of the well. Build a throne room for each of the two tyrants, plus a dungeon and some stone corridors, hire some extras, many of whom don’t mind nudity (which saves on wardrobe expenses), and you’ve got yourself a picture. I point this out to explain that no, The Warrior and the Sorceress is not a “good” movie, but it’s boozy fun and worth your time if you know what you’re getting into. Carradine plays Kain – that’s Kain with a “K,” and not the character he played on Kung Fu, wink-wink; often referred to as “The Dark One,” he’s a wanderer in a black robe with a sword slung to his back. Traveling through a parched, desert landscape with two suns in the sky, a la Tatooine, he arrives in a city built around one of the rare sources of water on this planet. Two factions battle for control of the well: the obese, decadent Bal Caz (Guillermo Marín), who prizes his giant pet lizard (a pathetic-looking rubber puppet), and the more ruthless Zeg (TV character actor Luke Askew), who is holding captive a sorceress, Naja (Maria Socas), and coercing her into creating an indestructible sword so that he can conquer Bal Caz once and for all. Kain, with no vested interest in a winner, decides to play both sides off one another to maximize his loot.

Maria Socas as the sorceress Naja.

If Kain’s actions sound familiar, that’s because The Warrior and the Sorceress is essentially a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s classic samurai film Yojimbo (1961). Some scenes are even directly lifted from the film, most notably a comic moment when the two armies face off in the town square, screaming and waving their swords at one another, but too frightened to act. Even Carradine dresses like a samurai, and inherits Toshirô Mifune’s swagger. Yojimbo had already been remade as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), and director Broderick extends his homage by including a soundtrack of Ennio Morricone-inspired, Spaghetti Western music (by Luis María Serra). The initial drafts of the screenplay were written by William Stout, the fantasy illustrator who created the poster for Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards (1977), and was a production artist on both Conan films; as he recounts on his website, the film was originally to be called Kain of Dark Planet, and written in the style of John Norman’s controversial, erotic Gor fantasy novels. He incorporated elements of Yojimbo, but never intended the film to be modeled so closely after Kurosawa’s film; he was dismayed to see the finished film was “unabashed plagiarism.” I would more charitably call it a remake, since the homage is so overt; as an adolescent I became aware of the film by reading about it in Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, which described its relation to Yojimbo with the term “copycat.” (In the same blog post, Stout also recounts how he had to threaten legal action to get his name attached to the film. Corman, apparently unaware that Broderick had removed Stout’s name from the screenplay, sent him a payment taken out of Broderick’s director’s fee.)

Kain, played by David Carradine, amidst the film's climactic battle.

The film’s origins as a tribute to Gor are evident in the finished product, most notably the otherwise baffling decision to have actress Maria Socas spend the entire film wearing only a thong. (The screenshot of Socas used in this post is one of the few I could take and still keep this site safe-for-work.) The statuesque, fiery-eyed actress ostensibly plays the “sorceress” of the title, though her role is that of the stereotypical fantasy slave girl, topless, chained, and awaiting rescue by the brawny hero. She doesn’t perform any sorcery, and those allusions to her powers feel like a last-minute rewrite to justify the title, which was forced upon Broderick by Corman. Her nude scenes – so abundant as to provide a good deal of the film’s unintentional humor – are matched only by a few other memorable touches of exploitation, such as the aforementioned four-breasted dancer, or the scene in which Zeg drowns a nude woman in a glass tank while he dines with Kain. These are highlights. The lizard still looks phony, as does the rubber, tentacled monster Kain battles in a dungeon; some of the sets look like they might topple over if you pushed on them, and the dialogue is riddled with fantasy gobbledygook that is delivered in the hammiest manner possible. Though there’s some genuine swordfighting choreography here, it’s staged lethargically. So why is it that I wish there were more B-movies like this today? The Warrior and the Sorceress may be ridiculous nonsense, but at least they knew how to put on a show.

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The Demoniacs (1974)

Posted on February 13, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

In a late-nineteenth century coastal village somewhere in Europe, a gang of land-moored pirates routinely use lights to deceive ships into wrecking upon the sharp rocks, and subsequently loot the remains. But one evening, after triumphing over their latest bounty, they see two blonde girls dressed in white nightgowns striding toward them from the sea – in the shallows, they seem to be divine, walking on water. The pirates rape and attack them. They think they’ve murdered them, but the village’s potent superstitions – that the wronged spirits of the dead might free a demon imprisoned in a nearby islet’s ancient ruins – lead them back to the crime scene. When they find the girls still scrabbling around the bones of wrecked ships, a fight and conflagration ensues. Yet the two castaways find their way to the ruins, where they encounter: a colorful clown, the long-bearded “Keeper of the Tomb,” and the mysterious man deep in its catacombs, waiting to lend his magical powers to innocents seeking revenge.

The guilt-ridden pirates: Paul (Paul Bisciglia), Bosco (Willy Braque), and the Captain (John Rico).

Even for a Jean Rollin film, The Demoniacs (Les démoniaques, 1974) is a very strange experiment. Although the setup seems straightforward, the style is so abstracted that the narrative is frequently incoherent, or deliberately absurd; a character who seems to be killed might return, perfectly healthy, a scene later. (This lends the film to a variety of interpretations, one of which is that the two girls were never alive in the first place.) Our cast seems to be stuck inside a repeating loop: rape, murder, avenge, repeat. They stumble through these actions with increasing paranoia and panic. Even when the two girls finally arrive at the island (an hour into the film) and have sex with the man in the tomb, thus gaining his mystical powers for the length of one night, that black magic is only used for a brief scene in which the girls force religious statuettes to tumble from the tops of the ruins, one crushing Demoniac‘s femme fatale. (In a Surrealist’s prankish gesture, Rollin has the figure of Jesus land upon the woman’s torso as though he were mounting her in the missionary position.) But Rollin shows his hand with the pre-credits sequence, an old-fashioned serial-styled introduction of the pirates, one at a time, as the narrator dishes out their biographies – much of which happens to be irrelevant detail. Immediately we can tell this movie isn’t meant to be taken seriously; once more Rollin is indulging his love of movie serials of the past. (Pierre Raph’s score also mimics the melodrama of old movie serials, dipping into library music for a deliberately cheesy effect.) Anyone looking for another Gothic vampire film should go elsewhere, as those overt supernatural elements which are in play are minimalized and eventually made irrelevant. That said, the film is just as erotic as those earlier films, if not more so, with nudity and sex galore, some of it on that uncomfortable-looking beach and its towering rocks.

Rollin's "It" girl of '73-'74, Joëlle Coeur, plays the lusty (and frequently unclothed) pirate Tina.

Once more Rollin dips into his repertory company to fill out his cast, most notably by casting the voluptuous Joëlle Coeur, she of the Rollin softcore romps Schoolgirl Hitchhikers (Jeunes filles impudiques, 1973) and Bacchanales Sexuelles (Tout le monde il en a deux, 1974). Coeur, unlike many of her peers, resisted the pull into hardcore pornography, though her work for Rollin is decidedly uninhibited. Here, as the would-be pirate queen “Tina” (is that really the best female pirate name Rollin could muster?), Coeur is at her most animalistic, bloodthirsty – delighting as her companions rape the two castaways – and then sexually aroused by her own bloodlust. The beauty possesses the spirit of the tortured Captain (John Rico, Alex in Wonderland), who can hardly resist her charms, even as he’s driven toward hysteria as the film’s events unfold. Rico has the film’s best scene: while drinking himself into a stupor in the village saloon, he hallucinates, Macbeth-style, that blood is dripping over his hands and into his cup. When he lifts his head, he sees the ghosts of the two girls, blanched white, gazing down on him from the landing above, blood oozing from their wounds. Willy Braque, the jewel thief from Schoolgirl Hitchhikers and soon to cameo in Rollin’s superior Lips of Blood (1975), looks like Tintin‘s Captain Haddock and is quite effective as the more ruthless (and level-headed) member of the gang. I can only assume that the Castel twins weren’t available to play the two blonde victims, since the part seems tailor-made for them. Instead, these paired females, who seem to drift through all of Rollin’s films, are played by Lieva Lone and Patricia Hermenier. Their roles are more physically demanding than anything else; in one memorable scene, they crawl on their hands across a beach at night, mirrored by the white crabs scuttling next to them. Louise Dhour from Requiem for a Vampire (1972) here has a choice role as a psychic bartender. I was pleasantly surprised to see the mysterious clown revealed as none other than the moon-eyed Mireille Dargent from Requiem; however, if I were ever to encounter a clown in the ruins of a tomb, I would get the hell out of there.

Mireille Dargent of "Requiem for a Vampire," well-disguised, plays the clown who greets visitors to the island's haunted ruins.

I wouldn’t call The Demoniacs a successful Rollin film; it’s ponderously paced (even for Rollin), and continually, even deliberately undermines its more intriguing story elements, to its own detriment. Nonetheless, it’s valuable in his filmography as a step forward toward Lips of Blood (which I’ll discuss next week), as he begins to reconcile the overt and lyrical surrealism of The Iron Rose (1973) with a more solid narrative, with the goal of creating cinema that unfolds like a waking dream. The fable-like elements at play in The Demoniacs have lots of possibilities, of which he never quite takes full advantage. Still, the landscape here is memorable, from the beach, which is decorated with shipwrecks, to the labyrinth-like island of towering ruins, like something out of Lovecraft. And here’s your chance to see what a Jean Rollin saloon looks like – with splayed bats and obscene artwork on the walls, and the same barmaids getting fondled by the same men 24/7. Say what you will about Rollin, but he was an original.

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