Eye of the Devil (1966)

Posted on February 10, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Based on Philip Loraine’s little-remembered suspense novel Day of the Arrow, J. Lee Thompson’s British thriller Eye of the Devil (1966) creeps up on its occult themes slowly, building over its hour-and-a-half toward revelations of a secret society and black magic. The cast is top-tier, headlining Deborah Kerr and David Niven, with prominent roles for Donald Pleasence, Sharon Tate (The Fearless Vampire Killers), and David Hemmings (Blow-Up). Thompson, who had directed The Guns of Navarone (1961), establishes an experimental mood in the opening scenes, offering fractured images of an arrow about to be fired into the air from a bow, a train moving through a tunnel, its somber, bearded passenger, a dove pierced by the missile and hitting the ground, a misty forest, candles, hooded figures with hidden faces, Tate’s beautiful face before a burning hearth, a fancy and well-attended dinner party, an amulet with an arcane symbol. All of these carefully chosen black-and-white images come at you rapid-fire, overwhelmingly, as if John Cassavetes had decided to boot Roman Polanski off the set and direct Rosemary’s Baby (1968) himself, in the style of Shadows (1959). Tate, of course, would soon meet and marry Polanski, and Eye of the Devil‘s plot would have been an ideal pick for the director, who loved placing the dark and mysterious in the context of the drab everyday; the story also shares elements with The Tenant (1976) and The Ninth Gate (1999). But the notion of something sinister and brutal – and often pagan – lurking just below the veneer of polite society was a natural and recurring theme for British horror: Hammer Films mined similar territory with The Witches (1966), the Dennis Wheatley adaptation of The Devil Rides Out (1968), and, most recently, Wake Wood (2011); the Warner Archives DVD of Eye of the Devil appropriately namechecks The Wicker Man (1973) in its summary.

Father Dominic (Donald Pleasence) welcomes the Marquis de Montfaucon (David Niven) back to his ancestral estate.

As with Rosemary’s Baby and The Witches, the film is told largely from a female point-of-view, in this case Catherine de Montfaucon (Kerr), a lady of society, whose husband Philippe (Niven), the Marquis de Montfaucon, harbors a dark secret. After Philippe receives a visitor (that somber man we glimpsed on the train), he tells his wife that he must return immediately to his ancient family’s estate; “the vineyards are failing,” he offers, as though his mere presence could restore them to health. Against his wishes, Kerr follows him, bringing with her their two children, Jacques and Antoinette. Shortly after arriving, she begins to realize she’s made a serious mistake. Philippe’s demeanor transitions from haunted to hostile and defensive. The beautiful de Caray twins who live on the estate, Odile (Tate) and Christian (Hemmings), prove to be heartless and sadistic; Christian aims an arrow directly at Catherine after she scolds him for slaying a dove right before her children. She finds more warning than sympathy from the matronly Countess Estell (Flora Robson, Black Narcissus). And as she pokes about the castle and its grounds, she glimpses mysterious rites and lurking silent figures in dark, hooded robes. Even the villagers seem to be in on the secret, casting her wicked stares. Then Odile almost gets Antoinette killed, and subsequently hypnotizes Catherine into walking to the brink of a high parapet. With this conflict now in the open, Catherine becomes hellbent on uncovering the secret of Philippe’s family, and deciphering the meaning of a painting that depicts the hooded figures circling a man in a field. Her only ally is her friend Jean-Claude (Edward Mulhare), as her husband becomes committed to the estate’s secret plot, and even her own children seem to be drawn into its influence.

Catherine (Deborah Kerr) discovers the ultimate purpose of the secret society.

Eye of the Devil looks fantastic, the black-and-white cinematography evoking an atmosphere of dread, and placing it in line with other B&W chillers of the 60’s, like The Haunting (1963), The Nanny (1965), and, of course, The Innocents (1961), which also starred Kerr. If it’s not as effective as those films, it might be because the mystery is a bit too easy to solve, and there’s not enough incident along the way to make that journey quite so memorable. Still – the sort of person who would want to seek out Eye of the Devil will find much to savor, namely in the novelty of seeing so many iconic actors assembled in a 60’s occult thriller. The de Caray twins are especially impressive, Hemmings with his bow, and Tate dressed in form-fitting black, issuing a cold smile while she asks the children to play just a bit closer to the precipice. The film seems perched between two eras of cinema, Kerr and Niven representing one, Hemmings and Tate the other – as though the battle enacted is a generational one. It also anticipates the more overtly Satanic horrors of 70’s genre cinema while maintaining the class and poise of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Ultimately it’s a curiosity, but it’s a satisfyingly well-executed one.

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Double Feature: Schoolgirl Hitchhikers (1973)/Bacchanales Sexuelles (1974)

Posted on February 8, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

The story is that while Jean Rollin was filming Requiem for a Vampire (1972), production manager Lionel Wallman encouraged him to include some scenes of a graphic sexual nature to make the film more commercial (Rollin relented, and filmed the distracting and repellent dungeon sequences). Wallman then suggested that if the director were to make a film entirely about sex – you know, without that artsy and vampire-themed surrealism that typified his work – they’d have a windfall. Again, Rollin agreed, and that experiment became Jeunes filles impudiques (“The Impudent Young Girls”), aka Schoolgirl Hitchhikers (1973). The erotic has always been an essential element of his films, but Jeunes filles impudiques marked a turn toward the then-popular genre of the sex film, a slippery slope into hardcore pornography that Rollin eventually tumbled down, ostensibly to help finance more personal films. He’d lose much of the 70’s to these endeavors. It was like a surrender; audiences didn’t come to a movie called The Nude Vampire (1970) for its playful references to the fantastique cinema and serials of France’s past. His most personal experiment, The Iron Rose (1973), flopped. So why not just give them what they want?

Marie Hélène Règne and Willy Braque prepare to torture Gilda Arancio.

His full name was Jean Michel Rollin Roth Le Gentil. For the work of which he was proud, he signed “Jean Rollin.” The Wallman-produced Jeunes filles impudiques was the first film to go out under the name “Michel Gentil” (there would be many more; for some of his later hardcore films he chose the pseudonym Robert Xavier). But though he never intended the film to be High Art, there’s a harmless, playful quality to the film; it doesn’t feel sleazy in the least, certainly not like the dungeon scenes in Requiem for a Vampire: the one incongruous moment of chained-up torture has a deliberately ludicrous feel, as though Rollin wants you to know he finds it just as silly as you do. The story bears a vague relation to the Judex-style plots of his previous work. Two girls are backpacking through the woods. One is Gilda Arancio, blonde, in an orange sweater and plaid schoolgirl’s skirt. The other is Joëlle Coeur, brunette, in a red jacket, bluejeans, and a purple shirt. They discover a two-story villa in the forest, and, finding it deserted, immediately climb into bed and start making love – naturally. (Incidentally, the version I viewed, from the Grindhouse Experience set, was cut, and the tame sex scenes never linger for more than a few minutes. Nevertheless, it’s evident that Rollin is more interested in beautiful nudes than the businesslike act of sex. I can’t speak to the nature of the uncut version, though a DVD is available.) Soon arrives a gunman (Willy Braque, later of Rollin’s Demoniacs), who takes shelter downstairs. Coeur, having a late-night cigarette outside, encounters the gunman and immediately seduces him (Arancio quickly joins them). After the two young pleasure-seekers depart happily the next morning, the gunman discovers that the stolen jewels he was stashing in the house have disappeared. His boss, a stern-looking villainess (Marie Hélène Règne), sends him out to chloroform and kidnap the girls, then torture them into revealing the whereabouts of the stolen jewels. Coeur escapes into town, where she finds a private detective and his pigtailed secretary (who packs her own heat, as we learn in the climax). After some chases and interrogations, the real culprit turns out to be none other than Jean Rollin, when he shows up at the villa and tries to clumsily seduce Coeur using the stolen gems. Eventually the crooks are arrested by the detective and his secretary, and Coeur and Arancio share a lusty kiss.

Jean Rollin's comic cameo in "Jeunes filles impudiques."

As a sex film, Jeunes filles impudiques must be considered a failure. It has the feel of some friends playing dress-up and shooting a home movie for laughs – which is precisely its charm. It’s a direct digression from Requiem for a Vampire – the same plot, but without the vampires or gore, and more of the sauciness. On the other hand, it’s an authentic glimpse into grindhouse cinema of the early 70’s, when the notion of sexploitation still held a giddy appeal to moviegoers of the pre-internet age. The problematic print on the Grindhouse Experience set is appropriately faded and beaten-to-hell, with the atrocious English-language dubbing you’d expect to encounter back in an American theater in 1973; sample dialogue: “It’s time for you to know that Jackie and I have a very intimate relationship. We like each other very much, and we act unblushingly when we’re together.” Try to casually drop the word “unblushingly” into a sentence today and see how it goes. Frequent Rollin collaborator Pierre Raph provides a fun soundtrack, with a surprisingly lovely main theme; a couple of years ago Finders Keepers Records issued a 7″ vinyl Jeunes filles impudiques EP, which is really as much as you need of the score.

Alain Bastin and Joëlle Coeur are shocked - SHOCKED - that their new French maid has no panties, in "Tout le monde il en a deux", aka "Bacchanales Sexuelles."

Tout le monde il en a deux (1974) was released in English-speaking territories with the title card Fly Me the French Way, as though the film were about French stewardesses. It’s not. (Synapse’s DVD uses the more appropriate title Bacchanales Sexuelles.) The original title roughly translates as “Everyone has two of them,” which is spoken defensively by a character in the film when he’s caught in the nude with the Castel twins (Catherine and Marie-Pierre, from The Nude Vampire). This one, unlike Jeunes filles impudiques, belongs completely to the realm of softcore pornography. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Rollin put his heart into this one, clearly he did spend a bit more time and effort, since it’s a more polished film, with a larger cast, a slightly more elaborate plot, and some genuinely funny comedy. Consider this the softcore parody of a Jean Rollin film, directed by one Monsieur Gentil. Rollin’s muse-of-the-moment, the lovely Joëlle Coeur, returns as young Valerie, apartment-sitting for her absent cousin. One might assume that her cousin was filmmaker Jean Rollin, since red candles adorn the voluminous bookshelves, and posters for Rape of the Vampire, The Nude Vampire, and Shiver of the Vampires decorate the walls. Lonely, she summons her friend and lover Sophie (the redheaded Marie-France Morel), and lovemaking ensues to the avant-garde jazz of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, which Valerie spins on the record player. That night, intruders dressed in white and black bodysuits and masks break into the apartment and kidnap Sophie. She’s delivered to a mansion, where she meets Malvina (Brigitte Borghese, billed as Britt Anders), a high priestess and sorceress who keeps a dungeon available in the cellar for circumstances just like these. Malvina is trying to expose a traitor in her cult, one who has been publishing exposés of her hedonistic activities. All she knows is that the traitor is a cousin of Valerie’s. Mistaking Sophie for Valerie, she has her taken to the dungeon to be tortured, while her aroused assistants, “Karl and Frida,” have unattractive and interminable sex nearby. Note to anyone venturing into this purely as a Rollin fan: there’s a lot of this kind of padding.

Sophie (Marie-France Morel) explores the apartment; note the poster for Rollin's superior "Shiver of the Vampires."

Meanwhile, a young man named Fred (Alain Bastin) arrives at the apartment looking for Sophie, and begins making love to Valerie instead – by accident, or so he claims. The next morning, both crawl out of bed and finally start to wonder where Sophie’s run off to. They make love again. Then he discovers negatives – dirty pictures – hidden in a small jar. Soon enough Malvina dispatches a blond maid to search the apartment for those very negatives; when she encounters Fred and Valerie, a three-way ensues. When the real maid shows up, she’s outraged that someone would try to steal her job: they tumble together onto the floor, tearing at each other’s clothes. Valerie makes a move to break up the fight, but Fred immediately stops her – a minor bit of business which I found to be one of the film’s highlights. Although I would have loved for Fred and Valerie to have gone and hired the detective and his assistant from Jeunes filles impudiques, instead they decide to raid Malvina’s mansion alone. Outnumbered by the Eyes Wide Shut-style hedonists, their only means to escape with Sophie is to enlist the help of Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castel, essentially playing the same roles they always do in Rollin’s films. At last, Malvina is undone, and Valerie’s reporter cousin is revealed to be none other than Malvina’s toady assistant, Paul (Jean-Paul Hazy), who pulls a gun on his mistress and demands that he be the dominant one in the evening’s S&M activities, for a change.

Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castel, reunited after "The Nude Vampire," save the day in "Tout le monde il en a deux."

It’s never exactly clear what “sorcery” is involved in Malvina’s secret society. When a “victim” (Annie Belle, later of Lips of Blood) is placed upon the altar during the climactic ceremony, all that ensues is more sex. If it weren’t for the fact that Malvina has Sophie kidnapped and chained up in the cellar, there really wouldn’t be any criminal activity involved at all. Still, this only adds to the parodic overtones of the film. Rollin fans will enjoy the references to his own work, as well as recognizing faces from his repertory company. It is, in the end, nothing more than silly softcore porn, with Rollin’s eye for the female form serving him in both loving and leering ways. It drags, but if viewed in pieces (i.e., fast-forward when the sex scenes start to bore you) it can be pretty amusing. And anyway, nothing can be too terrible with Joëlle Coeur as the star. She wasn’t a spectacular actress, but that wasn’t on the list of requirements.

Next week in our ongoing Rollinathon – something that isn’t porn! Stay tuned.

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Hercules (1983)

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


In the late 70’s and early 80’s, writer/director Luigi Cozzi was on his way to becoming the Italian Roger Corman. In fact, Corman had dubbed, edited, and distributed the American cut of Cozzi’s Star Wars rip-off Starcrash (1978). When Alien (1979) launched a trend of R-rated science fiction horror, Cozzi answered with Contamination (1980). Then Clash of the Titans (1981) hit the box office, and Cozzi watched the film, absorbed it, and eventually released a warped reflection with Hercules (1983), produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus (the impresarios who brought us The Apple, among many other slices of 80’s cheese). Clash of the Titans wasn’t just the swan song of Ray Harryhausen; it was the last major film to lean heavily upon stop-motion special effects, which would only be used in limited, carefully-disguised fashion by filmmakers until CG could finally take its place. But Cozzi loved Harryhausen films, and had already paid homage with numerous stop-motion sequences in Starcrash, including a direct and incredibly awkward recreation of the famous Talos sequence in Jason and the Argonauts (1963); his ode to Clash of the Titans wasn’t going to hold back, regardless of modern FX trends. Neither was he going to worry overmuch that the stop-motion effects at his disposal looked just as clumsy and cheap as they did on the hastily-made Starcrash (much of the same FX team was brought back, supervised by Armando Valcauda). He had a vision. His Hercules would have little to do with the sword-and-sandal films that Italy mass-produced in the 60’s. His would be a visual continuation of the world of Starcrash, a science fiction interpretation of Greek mythology.

Hercules (Lou Ferrigno) battles a stop-motion-animated mechanical insect.

Actually, what he produced was a film with the look of an 80’s Saturday morning cartoon, toy commercials and all.* Lou Ferrigno, fresh off The Incredible Hulk TV series and looking to launch a movie career, sprouts a neatly-trimmed beard, oils up, and leads the cast as our hero Herc, flexing his muscles, swinging his sword, and looking increasingly bemused as his meandering journey takes him from one psychedelic setpiece to the next. At one point, the sorceress Circe (Mirella D’Angelo, looking like a “Babooshka”-era Kate Bush), who has been leading Hercules from one task to another for about thirty minutes, abruptly dies; Hercules just stands there for a moment, staring at her, and then looks around, looking like a lost puppy. I couldn’t help him; I couldn’t remember what his quest was, either. Let’s see…oh, yes: Sybil Danning, staple of 80’s cheesecake (Battle Beyond the Stars, Chained Heat), plays the villainess, Princess Ariadna, who conspires to make Augeias (Brad Harris) ruler of Thebes by hiring assassins to kill the king and queen. But the royal offspring, the infant prince, Hercules, is secreted out of the palace and set adrift down a river in a boat. Now, Hercules has already been chosen by Zeus (Claudio Cassinelli) to be endowed with super-strength, so that he can fight Evil, which has been unleashed upon the world by the breaking of Pandora’s Jar. So when Hera (Rossana Podestà), resentful of her husband’s illegitimate child, sets two serpents/puppets to kill Hercules, the gurgling little kid finds the inner resources to destroy them. It’s pretty cute:

Adriana (Sybil Danning) tempts Hercules.

Raised by a husband and wife who find the super-strong orphan (Superman), Hercules grows his muscles to bodybuilder levels by turning a massive wheel (Conan the Barbarian). But Hera, not one to give up easily, soon sets a grizzly bear against Herc’s father, killing him; Herc attacks the stock footage and wrestles with a man in a bear costume. Then Hera enlists King Minos (William Berger) to slay Hercules. Minos agrees, though he’s also a big advocate of science over religion, which he likes to point out endlessly. He enlists his inventor, Daedalus, who in this telling is a scantily-clad woman (Eva Robbins). Daedalus builds a giant mechanical flying insect that kills Herc’s mother, and is defeated when our hero short-circuits it with a spear to its AA battery pack. After building a funeral pyre and solemnly lighting it (again, Conan the Barbarian), Hercules sets about on his restless journeys, first to Tyre, where he meets the evil Augeias and becomes champion in a fighting tournament (which ends with him hurling a giant log into outer space). He falls in love with Princess Cassiopeia (Ingrid Anderson), but when she’s captured by Augeias and Ariadna, he’s set on a long quest to end their tyranny and rescue the princess, with Hera placing various obstacles – most of them poorly-staged special effects – in his path.

Zeus (Claudio Cassinelli) exerts his will from a cosmic plane.

Rather than having his gods sitting atop a misty Mount Olympus, Cozzi places them on another planet, in front of a multi-colored starfield and amidst strange rock formations. Zeus wears an obviously phony white beard that doesn’t quite fit his narrow, youthful face; his crown looks like it was bought at a discount bin at Toys ‘R’ Us. The costumes worn by Hera and Athena (Delia Boccardo) are more 80’s New Wave, but just as awkward-fitting. Apparently under the impression that any kind of special effect will heighten the sense of movie magic, Cozzi ensures that not a scene goes by without some kind of distracting optical effect, whether it’s a poorly-matted background that doesn’t match against the foreground, or just random pulses of colored light, always accompanied by electronic hums and zaps. Therefore, the effects may be cheap, but there sure are a lot of them. Eschewing “realistic” monsters of Greek mythology, Cozzi once again uses mechanical creations which look like Transformer Dinobots. In a typical sequence, the monster hovers near Ferrigno, he pokes at it with a log or spear, and eventually it disappears in a ball of light. (This even happens when one creature falls into the sea. A splash of water arrives seconds too late and in the wrong place.) When Hercules travels to the Underworld, he battles a Cerberus, which summons some 80’s toy-store nostalgia:

After even copying the ritual bathing/bare-bum scene from Clash of the Titans, Cozzi puts together a climax in which Augeias gets to wield a flaming sword – with horizontal bands of different colors, so it looks like a rocket popsicle. Princess Cassiopeia, wearing pasties on her bare breasts, is lowered slowly toward a flaming lava pit (for once, foreshadowing a movie, in this case Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). Hercules is rewarded not just by gaining the princess, whom he hardly knows, but having her body inhabited by the spirit of his dead love Circe…or something. Then they become constellations, the fate of all Greek demigods, and because that also happened in Clash of the Titans. As I mentioned in my Starcrash review, I saw this film at the drive-in when it was released; it was an incoherent jumble then, and it’s an incoherent jumble now. But the off-kilter charm remains – not a scene passes which isn’t handled with a goofy incompetence. Nonetheless, there was a sequel, The Adventures of Hercules (1985), and, because the universe was not yet satisfied, Cozzi was reunited with Ferrigno again for Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989), a troubled production which Cozzi was fired from, and then re-hired to fix the work of his replacement, Enzo Castellari. Cozzi, who directed the Ferrigno films under the pseudonym Lewis Coates, now co-owns the legendary Profondo Rosso shop in Italy with fellow filmmaker Dario Argento.

* In the early 80’s, particularly in Saturday Morning cartoons, it seemed like every concept had to have a Star Wars-inspired, science fiction angle. The pop cultural impact of George Lucas was inescapable, like a black hole drawing in all other artifacts of the era. Actually, the one cartoon Hercules resembles the most is the anime Ulysses 31, a well-animated science fiction update of The Odyssey which ran from 1981-82.

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