The House on Straw Hill (1976)

Posted on November 14, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Like so many exploitation films of the 70’s, this one has multiple titles – it’s best known as Exposé (as it was originally released in its native Great Britain in 1976). In certain territories it went out as either Trauma or The House on Straw Hill, and I’m going with the latter title because that’s what appears on the print on the VHS tape I’m reviewing, released by New World Video in the mid-80’s. It’s also probably the most appropriate title for this atmospheric little thriller starring Udo Kier (Blood for Dracula) and Linda Hayden (The Blood on Satan’s Claw). Why am I reviewing a VHS tape (or, to be precise, a digital torrent of a VHS tape)? Because right now it’s the easiest way to view the full uncut version of the film: The House on Straw Hill made the infamous “video nasties” list compiled by the Department of Public Prosecutions in England to prevent explicit VHS tapes falling into the hands of children. After the Video Recordings Act of 1984, all “video nasties” were withdrawn from shelves, though many slipped back into availability after having the most offensive content removed, and then resubmitted to the British Board of Film Classification for review. Many of the nasties became eagerly-sought cult items as a result; and this was a list that included The Last House on the Left (1972), Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), The Toolbox Murders (1978), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Inferno (1980), The Burning (1981), and The Evil Dead (1981). To include The House on Straw Hill in this mix seems bizarre, since the violence is not all that extreme, and the sexual content, though eyebrow-raising, is certainly no more graphic than what was flooding British cinemas in the 1970’s.

Bestselling author Paul Martin (Udo Kier), suffering from delirium.

Udo Kier – dubbed – plays Paul Martin, a bestselling author who, in the opening scenes, is having difficulty making love to his voluptuous girlfriend Suzanne (Fiona Richmond) because he’s suffering violent visions which may or may not be flashbacks. He sees a bloody limb in a bathtub, and blood-spattered hands, and blood splashed upon his manucript Straw Summer. He hallucinates that a stranger is approaching from beyond the window, and panics that the window isn’t locked. Later, he rides out to a train station to greet the typist he’s hired, a pretty girl with straw-colored hair named Linda (Linda Hayden). “Haven’t I met you somewhere before?” he asks her, but she denies it. Paul is being pressured to turn in his belated manuscript, and he hopes that he can overcome his lack of progress by resorting to dictation. On the drive back to his cottage on Straw Hill, they encounter two thugs at a gas station (one of whom, oddly, is wearing a tee-shirt which says “I am a Vampyre” – perhaps a nod to Kier’s previous role as Dracula for Paul Morrissey?). The men begin aggressively coming on to Linda, and Paul literally fights them off before escaping with her in the car. Once at Straw Hill, Linda settles in behind the typewriter, while Paul delivers his purple prose, pacing about the room and sipping liquor. He’s also given to self-important speeches: “You know this is the first time I’ve had to work to a deadline? The more successful you get, the more they want the next one, the more they’re prepared to pay. And the longer it takes you to write, the more impatient this whole lot of idiots become!” Linda coolly responds, “But you’ve only written two books.” “Yes, but it’s still the same,” Paul says, and drinks from his glass.

Linda (Linda Hayden), looking unimpressed during one of Paul's pompous speeches.

There’s something a little off about Linda, as you’d expect. When she retires to her room, she pulls a man’s portrait from her suitcase, sets it beside her on the bed, and masturbates. She asks the elderly housekeeper, Mrs. Aston (Patsy Smart), to leave, suggesting Paul doesn’t need any further distractions. Mrs. Aston refuses, and a few short scenes later – as the housekeeper explores the house late at night – someone cuts her throat with a knife, splattering blood on the framed photos hanging on the wall. Her body disappears, and Linda explains to Paul that Mrs. Aston has suddenly decided to leave. When Linda takes a walk in the fields of tall wheat that surround the cottage, she lies down and begins to masturbate. (There’s not a lot to do at Straw Hill, I guess.) She’s suddenly confronted by the two men from the gas station; while one points a shotgun at her, the other rapes her. (Though not too graphic, this is one of the scenes cut from the U.K. home video release.) Linda beckons to the man with the shotgun, drawing him closer, then swiftly disarms him and shoots them both. She arrives back at the cottage, seemingly unperturbed. Dictation resumes.

Linda efficiently seduces Paul's girlfriend Suzanne (Fiona Richmond).

Paul digs through her luggage when she’s away, discovers a photo of himself, and begins to suspect that she’s up to something. Nevertheless, he makes a drunken pass at her, which is scornfully rebuffed. Sexually frustrated, he calls up Suzanne again, but when she arrives, Linda sets out to seduce her immediately. When she walks in on their lovemaking with a cold, callous stare, Paul quickly dresses and chases her – he’s tricked into driving off and leaving the cottage, and like the efficient seductress/psychopath she is, Linda circles back and makes passionate love to Suzanne, finishing what Paul had started. Meanwhile, Paul accidentally crashes his speeding car into a creek, thus conveniently delaying his return. After Suzanne stumbles across Mrs. Aston’s body stashed in a closet, she’s stalked by an unseen killer, cornered in a bathroom, and swiftly butchered by a slashing knife. By the time Paul gets back, Suzanne is declared “asleep and not to be disturbed.” Dictation resumes. Only this time she begins to take control of the manuscript, forcing her own opinions, typing what she wants. This leads to – not exactly a twist, as was so common in suspense thrillers post-Psycho – but a logical plot revelation that satisfyingly strips the egomaniac Paul Martin down to the bone.

Paul is cornered, bloodied, and exposed.

Director James Kenelm Clarke had a brief and undistinguished career, but does fine work on The House on Straw Hill, making good use of the evocative space (particularly the swaying fields of wheat). Some punchy shots play up the story’s pulpy style, including close-ups of the manual typewriter firing its typebars like bullets, and the carriage leaps at the camera like a battering ram. The close-ups of slit throats and splattered blood borrow from the burgeoning giallo genre (Kier was soon to cameo in one of the key giallo films, Argento’s Suspiria). But of course it’s the erotic element, so over-the-top that it nearly becomes deranged, which is central to the suffocatingly lurid atmosphere. This is an “erotic thriller,” by subgenre, and would make a good double feature with other thrillers about British sexual frustration, such as Hammer’s Crescendo (1969), or Baby Love (1968), the Lolita-on-acid exploitation film which had introduced Straw Hill star Hayden, then just a teenager, to the country’s cinemas. (The film also reminded me of all those increasingly absurd 90’s erotic thrillers that followed in the wake of Basic Instinct‘s success.) The stunningly beautiful Hayden was a gifted actress whose career, unfortunately, was derailed along with so many other British actors’ when the country’s film industry began to dry up in the 70’s. The only sure-fire way to make a profitable low-budget film was to sell it with sex, and Hayden went where the money was, transitioning from two excellent and subversive horror films (Taste the Blood of Dracula and The Blood on Satan’s Claw) into Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) and the like, many with her real-life romantic interest Robin Askwith. (Hayden has a role in the remake of The House on Straw Hill/Exposé, 2010’s Stalker, which features as its protagonist a female writer named Paula Martin, played by Anna Brecon.) The tremendously popular sexpot Fiona Richmond was a columnist for Men Only magazine and a star of burlesque in London’s West End, and this was one of her first major roles, though I must say she’s not much of an actress. Udo Kier’s long and prolific career in genre films is well-known and needs no rehashing; he still makes several films a year, and recently played Pope Innocent VIII on the TV series Borgia. Here, he makes the most of his bulging eyes and fevered expressions. Make no mistake, The House on Straw Hill is not high art, but it’s very entertaining grindhouse.

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Starcrash (1978)

Posted on November 11, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

I can only ponder what a modern youth would think of Starcrash (1978); a kid who begs for more Star Wars action after watching the six films, and accidentally stumbles across this 70’s Italian B-movie at the local video store. I sincerely hope that happens, somewhere. Such brain-jarring accidents used to happen more commonly, in the days before the Internet, when a trip to the local video store was so central to kicking boredom, until you inevitably became overly familiar with your local store’s selection, down to every unexpected find. As a child and pre-teen, I wasn’t allowed to rent R-rated movies, so I scoured the shelves, and made it a mission to rent every single PG or G-rated fantasy, science fiction, and horror film. Thus, I was weaned on Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff instead of Jason Voorhees and Michael Meyers. I saw every Ray Harryhausen movie a hundred times. I watched Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) when it was just a dubbed, cut-down VHS tape called Warriors of the Wind, featuring a misleading cover in which the giant lava-creature from the film’s climax is holding a lightsaber as though he’s some kind of Jedi sidekick (and the heroine is shoved off into the corner of the image, usurped by a blonde Luke Skywalker-looking fellow). No lightsabers were featured in that film, to my disappointment, but I couldn’t say the same for Starcrash. Rather, this film craved to be the Star Wars clone I was looking for. When my little fingers popped it into the VCR, I quickly realized that I’d stumbled across…something. Something that was aching to deliver everything I wanted, but was instead producing ninety minutes of Starcrash. I was befuddled, but I wasn’t bored.

A typically colorful starfield (and looming claw-shaped spaceship) from "Starcrash."

I recognized two of the stars: somehow, Caroline Munro I was aware of (probably from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad); and I was certainly intrigued by the VHS tape boasting of the presence of David Hasselhoff. Michael Knight, in a science fiction space opera? Sold! Yet as the film begins (with a spaceship passing slowly over the top of the screen, exactly like the opening of Star Wars), the Hoff was nowhere to be found. Instead, my heroes were apparently Munro, as Stella Star, and some blond guy with a perm named Akton (Marjoe Gortner), both of them badly dubbed. Worse, these two space bandits quickly acquire a sidekick in the form of a robot cop who looks like Darth Vader but talks like a cartoon cowpoke. His name is Elle…like the women’s magazine. In the opening scene, Stella Star and Akton are fleeing Elle, in his cop car/spaceship, and go into hyperspace (followed by “normal space,” as they call it), and are almost drawn into the pull of a star until they jettison part of their spacecraft; the background stars look like Christmas lights, and the special effects look cheap, like a kid making home movies while playing with his toys. And then: the dialogue. “They found one damn survivor!” announces an officer to the villainous Count Zarth Arn, played by Joe Spinell of Maniac, and in his red cape and goatee looking pretty much exactly like Jon Lovitz as the Devil on Saturday Night Live. “But his brain seems to be thoroughly damaged,” the officer adds hopefully. The Count spreads his arms and moans, “Come to me golehhhhms,” and summons two stop-motion-animated robots who look like Mickey Mouse and carry scimitars, for some reason. I was in for a trip.

A spaceship swoops to the rescue behind a giant (and apparently female) robot.

David Hasselhoff is, in fact, in this film, but it takes a while before he puts in his now-classic appearance. In the meantime, we’re treated to an episodic narrative in which Stella Star, Akton, and gosh-shucks robot Elle investigate mysterious crashes on different planets, each of which presents a different monster and/or poorly-matted special effect and/or terrible makeup. Stella dresses in a revealing outfit which makes it seem that she’s playing Vampirella (if only!). On the first planet they reach, they encounter a tribe of Amazons just as scantily-clad, and during their escape encounter a towering, lumbering robot much like Talos in Jason and the Argonauts, although this one has tits and is crudely-animated. On another planet covered in snow, Stella and Elle are betrayed by their companion Thor (a green, bald man who looks like he stepped out of Bert I. Gordon’s The Magic Sword), and spend the night on the snowy plain, where the temperature dips “thousands of degrees.” After Akton comes to the rescue, he helps Elle carry Stella Star’s popsicle-body into the ship, where she’s safely thawed by a laser beam that Akton shoots out of his hand. In other words, he’s a Jedi; indeed, later he produces his own lightsaber to battle the two Mickey Mouse-looking robots with the scimitars.

Stella Star (Caroline Munro), Thor (Robert Tessier), and Akton (Marjoe Gortner)

But Akton’s powers are more vast than a mere Jedi’s. “So you see into the future!” Stella gasps at him after she’s been un-popsicled, and he reveals that he knew Thor would betray them all along. “All these years you never told me. Think of all the trouble I might have avoided!” “You would have tried to change the future,” Akton responds reasonably, “which is against the law. So therefore I can tell you nothing.” The subject is abruptly dropped and never raised again. Akton might seem increasingly god-like as the film wears on, but that’s nothing compared to the “Emperor of the First Circle of the Universe,” played by none other than Christopher Plummer from The Sound of Music. “You know something, my boy?” he tells David Hasselhoff. “I wouldn’t be Emperor if I didn’t have some powers at my command.” Then the golden-caped Plummer turns away dramatically and intones, “Imperial Battleship – halt the flow of time!” This is followed by a cheap-looking special effect.

The evil Count Zarth Arn (Joe Spinell) reclines amongst his alien harem.

All of this action is set to inappropriately gorgeous music. Any casual film score buff would instantly recognize it as the work of John Barry (1933-2011), best known for his scores to the James Bond films, and indeed he seems to be using this low-profile project to brainstorm ideas for Moonraker (1979). There’s a rumor that when director Luigi Cozzi delivered the footage to Barry, he lied and told him the special effects were just test animatics and the finished FX would be added later. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’d like to believe it. Starcrash has such a primitive look: on the one hand, it’s like a student film, experimenting with special effects without professional know-how. On the other hand – and this is partly why it has such a large cult following – the film has its own uniquely psychedelic feel. There’s something infinitely trippy to the way the sky of every planet is some other sky matted in, with time-lapse photography cloudscapes swooping over the heads of the actors who aren’t even lit to match that sky. Or the way that lava lamps figure so prominently in the backgrounds; if something doesn’t look science fictiony enough, Cozzi mattes in some bubbling lava lamp action. Roger Corman re-edited the film for release in America (Joe Dante edited the trailer); and Starcrash played at actual theaters. Wrap your head around that – unsuspecting audiences saw all this on the big screen.

Akton prepares for battle.

Luigi Cozzi would, in a few more years, direct the similarly deranged Hercules (1983), starring Lou Ferrigno. Now that one I saw at the drive-in. I would have been about seven years old, but I remember vividly the confusion that the film provoked. I’d been expecting Clash of the Titans (1981), but instead I got its evil doppelganger. When we got home, my father complained, “That movie was terrible.” I wondered over those words – I took in the simple critique as possibly invaluable information. Because when you’re a kid you don’t have the faculty to apply an ironic appreciation to a bad film. There aren’t any bad films, as such, just awesome ones and boring ones. Hercules and Starcrash couldn’t fit into those particular paradigms; they had been irresponsibly unloaded upon my consciousness, filling it with scantily-clad babes, silvery stop-motion toy robots, and nonsensical dialogue. For a brief while, the flow of time had halted, and it’s difficult for a young brain to not be marked forevermore.

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Requiem for a Vampire (1972)

Posted on November 9, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

This, Jean Rollin’s fourth vampire film, would be his last for a while – he would try something artsier next, before getting sidelined into the sexploitation market. You can begin to see that grindhouse pull with Requiem for a Vampire (1972), which is notably sleazier than his earlier offerings. On the other hand, it’s also more experimental – most of the film contains no dialogue whatsoever, and relies solely upon its dream-like visuals. These are the two sides of Jean Rollin, clashing more strongly than ever: a need to meet seedier commercial requirements (consider the kinds of theaters where his films typically played), and a need to satisfy his own unique muse. In an interview published in the Fall 1973 issue of Cinefantastique, he said that for his first film, Rape of the Vampire (1968), the sexploitation element was imposed on him by the producer and distributor: “We were given a simple ultimatum: if you want your film released, we can release it on the sex circuit. They wouldn’t think of attempting a pure horror film.” He boasted, “As I didn’t intend it for the sex circuit, I prefer Requiem pour un vampire. It may be the last one. In its ninety minutes there are only four or five minutes of eroticism, only two scenes really. During the first hour of the film there is no dialogue, only music and sound effects.” What he didn’t explain was that the nature of those “four or five minutes” (which is a conservative estimate) are much more intense and uncomfortable than what he had filmed in the past. (The picture would be released in some markets as Caged Virgins.) Nonetheless, a great deal of the piece has that melancholy, wistful tone common in his work, and many Rollin fans consider it their favorite of his vampire cycle.

Marie (Marie-Pierre Castel) rescues Michelle (Mireille Dargent) from being buried alive by gravediggers.

Though his first three films seem to exist in the same endless loop of graveyards, castles, and beaches, the opening scene of Requiem for a Vampire is a jarring change of pace. A woman in a clown costume and makeup is firing a gun out of the shattered rear window of a speeding car. The driver is bleeding profusely, and next to him is another young woman dressed as a clown. Gunfire is exchanged with the car in pursuit. (But, seeing as this is a semi-artsy French film, the two cars are shooting at each other from a very short distance, interminably and with no progress, and they’re maybe driving about thirty-five miles an hour, max. Jean-Luc Godard might have directed this “action” scene.) They lose their tail by taking a side road into a forest, but the driver abruptly dies, leaving the two girls to douse his body with gasoline and set fire to him and the car. After wandering through the woods, they change into sexy little outfits and steal a motorcycle. A misadventure in a cemetery almost leads to the brunette, Michelle (Mireille Dargent), getting accidentally buried alive by some careless gravediggers – the blonde Marie (played by one-half of the Castel twins from The Nude Vampire, Marie-Pierre), rescues her at the last moment. It’s foreshadowing. Soon they encounter a castle, which they presume abandoned, until they realize they’ve stirred a nest of vampires – including one played by Dominique, the gaunt, clock-dwelling vampiress from Shiver of the Vampires. The vampires are looking for some virgins to join their cause and extend their race. The two girls are mesmerized and given their first mission: to seduce some men back to the castle so they can be slaughtered and feasted upon. Michelle follows her orders to the letter, and drinks the blood of her kill, but Marie disobeys – she lets the first one she meets, Frédéric, take her virginity. As it happens, this supports the strategy of an old man in a cape dwelling in the castle mausoleum, who is a true vampire living amongst pretenders. Conspiring against the cult that inhabits his castle, he seeks to end his bloodline once and for all.

Just one of the many strange sights in Jean Rollin's castle of horrors.

If Requiem for a Vampire is even more of a stylistic experiment than its predecessors, it also continues the trend of telling simpler, more coherent stories. It unfolds like an adult, erotic fable. Marie and Michelle are lesbian lovers (there’s a tentative, quickly-aborted attempt at a love scene). Michelle is genuinely hurt that Marie surrenders her virginity rather than committing to life as an immortal vampire. As another of Requiem‘s many conundrums, one of its most exploitative scenes is also its most strangely touching: Michelle is ordered to whip the nude body of her chained-up friend until she confesses where she’s hiding Frédéric. As Michelle pleads with Marie to please talk so she can stop torturing her – or they’ll both be killed – Rollin shoots a close-up of Mireille Dargent’s moon-like face, the tears streaming down in rivulets like blood from a wound. The torture chamber is a sickly, glowing green; Rollin here continues the expressionistic use of color begun with The Nude Vampire. He lights the film’s most grotesque sequence in a deep red: the prolonged (way too long) torture and rape of female captives by the brutish male servants of the vampires. The final, quasi-surrealistic shot of this scene is a vampire bat clamped upon a woman’s genitals. So yep, that’s been put on celluloid – thanks.

Michelle pleads to Marie - while whipping her - in the castle torture chamber.

But the ending is so muted, almost tragic; of all the titles under which this film was distributed, Rollin preferred Requiem for a Vampire, perhaps because it points toward the solemn tone of that final scene in which the old vampire retires to his mausoleum to die, while one of his servants, compelled to obey his every command, sits against her will to guard the door. This was the kind of film Rollin really wanted to make. “The more people who can acquire the backing to make cinefantastique, the better it will become,” he said in 1972. “We must find a way to eliminate the erotic element that is imposed upon us. But it is very difficult to make fantasy films here. It is a genre which is despised. The pure fantasy film, without explicit blood and gore, is difficult to achieve successfully. I have tried, but I have failed. The burning question that needs answering is, is there a public for such films?” I suspect Rollin was a bit too defensive, in his efforts to have his films taken seriously by critics who’d rather be reviewing the likes of Godard and Truffaut. We can see now that Rollin never completely excised the erotic from his work, in his long and prolific career; it became integrated into his personal style. In his best films, such as Shiver of the Vampires and Fascination (1979), the sexual theme is indispensable, and certainly a valid subject for thoughtful exploration. Requiem for a Vampire at times crosses the line into sleaze, but in its best moments, the erotic is powerful. Rollin was still experimenting with making this approach work, and those experiments would bear some fruit in the films to come – even as his career would become increasingly fractured. The future, for Rollin, would hold a pure “art” film (The Iron Rose, 1973), as well as both softcore and hardcore pornography (for money, and under a pseudonym). Perhaps he was never destined for a wide critical appreciation, but a cult following as exclusive as those he depicted on film.

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