Blood and Roses (1960)

Posted on October 12, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Roger Vadim was one of the most sensationalistic directors of his day; beginning with the risqué And God Created Woman… (1956), which introduced the world to Brigitte Bardot, each of his films was an event, and, along with his personal life, fodder for the tabloids. Over time, he became best known for his relationships with his starlets. His film work was taken less seriously by critics, as he was swiftly overtaken by the more daring and intellectual directors of the French Nouvelle Vague. Increasingly, his films tended toward camp: these days, he’s still best known for Barbarella (1968), a pop-art, paper-thin fantasy based on the erotic French comic strip that exists largely as a showcase for his then-squeeze, Jane Fonda. Most of his films were about sex, and for that he was unapologetic. I’d imagine film classes now skip Vadim entirely; why show one of his commercial hits when you could be showing a Godard instead? But Blood and Roses (Mourir de plaisir, 1960) deserves to be an exception. Vadim could be a very gifted stylist, and when he had the right subject matter, was capable of remarkable effect. In a year overcrowded with great films, this one is something of a forgotten treasure. And it’s a vampire movie.

Annette Vadim as Carmilla Karnstein

Vadim had just filmed Les liaisons dangereuses (1959) – based on the 1782 novel by Choderlos de Laclos – with his latest wife, the beautiful Annette Stroyberg. She wasn’t a professional actress, but she longed to be in one of her husband’s films, and so he obliged by giving her the starring role. By the time he began work on Blood and Roses, their marriage was already crumbling; Vadim claimed she was having an affair with a pop singer. If this lends a despondent feeling to the film, it’s only to the story’s benefit. Blood and Roses was based on the famous (and much-filmed) 19th century vampire novella Carmilla.  In his 1975 autobiography, Memoirs of the Devil, Vadim writes: “I adore the fantastic. Carmilla, the young vampire in Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel, held a special place in my own personal mythology. I decided to give her Annette’s face. But despite the success of my latest film, persuading a producer and distributors to put their money into a film about a female vampire, to be shot in sunny Italy, in the age of the jet plane and television, was no easy matter. I had a hundred offers of so-called commercial subjects with big stars. They were right, but I could imagine no better role for Annette, and I have never been very good at seeing reason.” He said of Annette Vadim, “[The film] gave its heroine a taste, not for blood, but for freedom.” Their marriage barely lasted to the film’s premiere; his next picture would star Bardot once more.

Leopoldo Karnstein (Mel Ferrer) shares the piano with his cousin Carmilla.

But the melancholy origins of Blood and Roses only enhance the film’s strange qualities. All of its shots of sunny Italy and jet planes, which are, indeed, inappropriate for a Gothic picture, underline the film’s theme of an ancient heritage intruding upon modern day life. Deliberately, there are no scenes borrowed from Hammer’s recent Dracula (1958) – no vampires creeping through windows to seduce young brides; no grisly stakings in mausoleums. Rather than listening to a Van Helsing lecture about the hallmarks of the vampire, we receive clumsy folklore whispered by two gossiping adolescent girls, who drape garlic about their necks when they suspect that vampirism is afoot. It’s parodic – comic relief. Real vampirism is beyond the understanding of the two girls, because it involves adult desires. When a fireworks celebration, for a costume ball at an old abbey, sets off hidden landmines from the war, a previously-hidden crypt is opened, and Signorina Carmilla, exploring, discovers the tomb of her seventeenth century ancestor, Millarca, who was said to be a vampire. In a scene that recalls Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, released the same year, the tomb slides open of its own accord, and something unseen confronts Carmilla. When next we see her, she seems to be possessed by the spirit of Millarca. She develops a craving for blood. Horses are frightened of her, and refuse to let her mount. When she meets a young local girl named Lisa, she stalks her through an orchard, and finally chases her right off a cliff. This killing takes place in the golden hours of dawn, in the gorgeous and lush Italian countryside. Carmilla is a vampire who refuses to waste the daylight, and Vadim has no interest in shooting a film whose visuals aren’t as sweet as candy.

Lisa's corpse is discovered at the bottom of a cliff by a local peasant girl.

Carmilla also begins advancing her relationship with her “first cousin and childhood playmate,” Leopoldo De Karnstein, played by Mel Ferrer (The World, The Flesh, and the Devil). She begins to drive a wedge between Leopoldo and his fiancée, Georgia (the Italian beauty Elsa Martinelli, looking very Sophia Loren-esque): she seduces them both. Granted, neither seduction proceeds further than a kiss, but Vadim lavishes such attention on both encounters that the eroticism is off the scale. Lesbianism? Check. Quasi-incestuousness? Check. But actual sex is withheld – this is a film about taboo temptations. Vadim enjoyed being scandalous (for the press must have something to write about), and so when Carmilla sees her reflection in the mirror – covered in blood where, presumably, she had been staked in a former life – she rips off part of her dress in anger, and collapses semi-nude upon her bed. There is only one brief sequence late in the film which features actual nudity (though not by any of the stars), yet this is a sensual film throughout, embracing the novel’s famous erotic qualities. (A later adaptation, 1970’s The Vampire Lovers, would have license to push the envelope further, though without the lyricism found in Vadim’s film.)

Carmilla kisses a drop of blood off the lips of Georgia (Elsa Martinelli).

A dream sequence climaxes the film, in which Carmilla attempts to possess Georgia. Ostensibly, this is done with a bite on the neck, but that’s not what we see: Vadim subverts the genre convention by showing the possession from Georgia’s point of view, as Carmilla enters her mind. The black-and-white dream sequence – if it can be called that – evokes the work of Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel. First we see bright red blood streaking down from the neck of the monochromatic Carmilla – an unsettling but dazzling image. Then the dead Lisa calls to Georgia from the window; she’s swimming in a wall of water. Georgia opens the window and steps forward, directly into the water, her step becoming a dive and a splash. She walks across a courtyard of costumed dancers, and through a tunnel crowded with waiting women and posed female mannequins, until she is seized by nurses and carried into an operating room. There, Carmilla is conducting a surgery upon a topless woman, attended by masked nurses with bloody gloves. She tells Georgia, “I am Millarca. Carmilla is dead. I killed her the night of the ball.” She reveals the face of Carmilla on the operating table. Then Millarca is embracing Georgia, twirling in a black void while a wind howls on the soundtrack, and she bites down on Georgia’s neck. In theory this is  pretentious, but damn if it isn’t breathtaking to watch.

In a fantasy sequence, the dead Lisa (Gabriella Farinon), submerged in water, calls to Georgia from the window.

Vadim is ably served by his cinematographer, Claude Renoir (The River, The Golden Coach), and composer Jean Prodromidès, who crafts a theme music for Carmilla that’s both romantic and desolate. The immortal spirit of Millarca narrates the story, and though we receive a psychoanalytical interpretation of the events by a doctor (shades of Psycho‘s denouement), it’s Millarca who has the final word, mocking the diagnosis and urging you to let go of rational explanation. Take her advice.

>
Posted in Theater Caligari | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

The Abominable Snowman (1957)

Posted on October 10, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

1957 was a landmark year for Hammer Films: The Curse of Frankenstein was released that spring, a full-color adaptation of the Mary Shelley tale with Peter Cushing as the doctor, Christopher Lee as his monster, gooey brains, bright red blood, and a proud “X” certificate. It was full speed ahead into the new world; Dracula (1958), The Mummy (1959), and more than a decade’s worth of sequels would follow. Often overlooked in this explosion of classic horror is The Abominable Snowman, released in the late summer of ’57, following hot on the heels of both The Curse of Frankenstein and Quatermass 2. It could be seen as a transitional film for the studio. The black-and-white, the evolution theme, and the script from Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale, all seem to grant it a kinship to Hammer’s 50’s SF thrillers initiated by The Quatermass Xperiment (1955). But it is a monster movie, after all, and Peter Cushing is the star. Transitional or not, this is classic Hammer horror, and one of their best films of the decade.

Tom Friend (Forrest Tucker) and John Rollason (Peter Cushing) cope with the aftermath of a Yeti's rampage.

Cushing is top-billed, but he shares the space with an American, Forrest Tucker, who had starred in countless B-westerns, and would shortly appear in Auntie Mame (1958) as well as another British SF movie, The Crawling Eye (1958). It was standard practice in this period for Hammer to recruit an American actor to help sell their product to the States, though one doubts there would be many American boys desperate to see a movie called The Abominable Snowman just because Forrest Tucker was in it. No, the monster is the allure here, and director Val Guest (The Quatermass Xperiment) smartly uses anticipation of the titular Yeti to his advantage, keeping the creature off-screen as much as possible while continually hinting at its presence. In the meantime, it’s Cushing who dominates. He’s the hero, Tucker the antagonist (though he’s named, ironically, Tom Friend); and you root for the British botanist while scowling and shaking your fist at the bloodthirsty, thick-headed American. Cushing plays John Rollason, and as the film opens, he’s trying to negotiate with a Tibetan Lhama (Arnold Marle) for permission to explore the Himalayan cliffs around the monastery, ostensibly to study the plant life beneath the snows. But there are suggestions that the Lhama can read minds, and soon enough he susses out Rollason’s true motive: he will be meeting up with the notorious American hunter Friend to track down the mythical Yeti. The Lhama gives his permission, but warns him that he might not like what he finds. So Rollason departs into the treacherous slopes with Friend and a small team of climbers, leaving behind his stubborn wife Helen (a wonderfully headstrong Maureen Connell) and their stuffy teammate Fox (the ubiquitous British actor Richard Wattis).

Publicity still for the American release: Maureen Connell (left), Richard Wattis (right), and their Sherpa guide search for John Rollason's lost party.

Once deep in the wilds of the Himalayas, Tom Friend proves to be unworthy of his name: his real intention, he reveals, is to capture one of the creatures alive; along with a trapper named Ed Shelley (Robert Brown, The Steel Bayonet), he’s working for a commercial venture which intends to turn a profit on the discovery of the Abominable Snowman (shades of King Kong‘s Carl Denham). Rollason is outraged – he only wanted to study the creature in its habitat – but he depends upon their skills to find the Yeti, and so they form an uneasy truce. One member of their party, McNee (Michael Brill), begins to psychologically unravel under the keening noises heard in the distance (and which can only belong to Yeti). When he glimpses a giant, hairy claw pushing through his tent and groping about, handling one of their rifles, he is further undone. But soon enough Shelley actually manages to shoot one of the creatures dead – much to Friend’s consternation, since he’d rather have a live specimen. We don’t see the Yeti’s body directly; Val Guest plays coy. You see its colossal shape beneath a canvas, and a hairy arm extending out of it. When the trackers expose the face, we see only their expressions, and listen to their awestruck description of it: not human, but not animal…wise-looking and strangely sad. As they camp out with the body of the creature, Friend insists they use it as bait to bring in another – and this one he intends to capture alive. As you’d expect, disaster follows.

Amidst the freshly-dug graves of his teammates, Tom Friend confronts the monster in this publicity still.

What separates The Abominable Snowman from its Hammer brethren is the stunning location footage of the climbers navigating steep and snowy mountains, captured by Guest in the French Pyrenees. Though we’re always aware that our actors are on sets (however great-looking those sets are), the integration of the location shots is skillfully done, and it’s easy to suspend your disbelief and get lost in the mountains with Cushing, Tucker, and company. The script by Kneale, adapted from his teleplay The Creature, strikes sparks with every line of dialogue, and remains compelling to the very end, and the Yeti’s ultimate, eerie reveal; Kneale really was the Stephen Moffat of his day. It’s also easy to admire that, for a 50’s monster movie, this one does not take the position that it’s best to kill the monster. The Yetis represent some evolutionary offshoot, perhaps a superior one to the human race; to murder them, in this context, is presented as the moral equivalent of setting off an atom bomb: somehow, we’re dooming our race. And they’re psychic, did I mention? Just as the High Lhama practices low-level psychic powers when he’s in the presence of Cushing, and (it’s suggested) astral projection, the Yetis have an even more sophisticated psychic ability. Perhaps it’s their ability to read a man’s mind and soul that ultimately saves Rollason from their wrath. This is first-rate Hammer, with another grand, evocative score by James Bernard. The new bare-bones, budget DVD from Icon in the UK is serviceable; it’s an anamorphic transfer, but lacks detail, and doesn’t seem as film-like. A Blu-Ray would be welcome.

Posted in Theater Caligari | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on The Abominable Snowman (1957)

Maniac (1980)

Posted on October 7, 2011 at 9:13 am by Jeff Kuykendall

The late 70’s and early 80’s were the golden age of the slasher film, and by that I mean that a lot of slasher films were made – a lot – some of them good (The Burning), a scattered few of them great (Halloween, Black Christmas), and most of them terrible. They were spawned by the Italian giallo films, which wedded detective-mystery plots with stylish direction and grotesque violence, the most famous directed by Mario Bava and Dario Argento. The North American incarnation pared down its plots with a meat cleaver, and unless it was directed by Brian De Palma, it was typically a straightforward affair; if there was a twist, you could usually see it coming (well, except for Sleepaway Camp‘s, which is insane). Critics hated them, confused adolescent boys loved them, and I tell you all this that you already know only to frame the only unique identifier which marks Maniac (1980) in that “golden period” drenched in blood: it tells its slasher story from the killer’s point of view. That’s it. Oh, that and the killer is a mannequin fetishist. The film has a minor cult following, and near as I can figure it’s because of all those mannequins.

A nurse (Kelly Piper) tries to hide from the maniac in a subway restroom, while the graffiti suggests that perhaps you would enjoy "Apocalypse Now."

Actually, the film is a bizarre showcase for the prolific character actor Joe Spinell, whose credits include many of the major films of the 1970’s, including The Godfather: Part II (1974), Stay Hungry, Rocky, Taxi Driver (all 1976), and, perhaps most importantly, the David Hasselhoff masterpiece Starcrash (1978). Spinell co-wrote and stars in Maniac, playing Frank Zito, a psychopath who seems to be about sixty percent Son of Sam, twenty percent Ed Gein, and twenty percent Norman Bates. I know, I know – Psycho was inspired by Ed Gein, but Spinell does his best to channel Anthony Perkins, narrating several scenes with an interior monologue in which he pathetically whines to his dead, domineering mother; he also likes to kill women and scalp them, placing the bloody scalps on the heads of department store mannequins which he poses about his apartment. And that apartment: it screams “crazy,” but it doesn’t look like it could have possibly been decorated by Frank Zito. The walls are covered with drawings of grotesque monster-babies, partial faces sculpted out of plaster, naked baby dolls, the aforementioned mannequins posed at sharp angles so that they almost resemble jumping jacks, and – I don’t want to forget this – a Christmas wreath hanging on the door, right above the screaming plaster half-face. It looks like twenty-year-old students from NYU were holding some avant-garde art show in his dingy one-room dwelling; I don’t believe the working-class Spinell had anything to do with this. Except possibly the Christmas wreath, which really brightens the place up.

Joe Spinell, as Frank Zito, strangles a prostitute.

We’re introduced to Frank as he slits the throats of a couple cuddling in a sleeping bag on a beach during the pre-dawn hours. This is the kind of slasher film that pays special attention to how the blade cuts through the flesh, and how realistically the blood oozes. In other words, it’s a Tom Savini film – slasher’s makeup artist celebrity (Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13th) was allowed to go wild on Maniac, most notably in his own death scene. Savini, playing “Disco Boy” (according to the end credits), is a heavily mustachioed dude who pulls to the side of the road – a good place to get killed – and delivers his single line of dialogue to his date: “Want to meet me some place? The back seat?” His eyebrows dance up and down like he’s Groucho Marx. Then they slip into the back and begin making out, until Frank Zito suddenly appears about one inch away from the window, breathing heavily. Disco Girl sees him, and says, “I see something!” As though there weren’t an extremely well-lit Joe Spinell one inch away from the window breathing heavily. They return to the front seat, but when Savini turns on the car’s headlights, Frank Zito appears clutching a shotgun. Then our killer leaps onto the hood of the car like a ninja and blows Disco Boy’s head off. In slow-motion, it explodes like a watermelon. One can almost hear Savini screaming “Yeeeeeaaaahh!” from off-camera while his dummy is reduced to a headless, gory mess.

Tom Savini, as Disco Boy, seconds before death.

The next day, Zito goes to the park, where his photo is snapped at random by a fashion photographer, Anna D’Antoni (cult movie fave Caroline Munro, of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter, and The Spy Who Loved Me). He takes note of her name and address from a bag she leaves behind, and eventually tracks her back to her loft, pretending to be an artist with a shine to Anna’s photos. Anna is immediately smitten, and accepts his offer for a date, because come on – she’s Caroline Munro and he’s Joe Spinell: let the chemistry do its magic. If you had the body of a supermodel and a promising career in the fashion industry, and a stranger appears at your door, portly and with the complexion of a rock quarry, wouldn’t you immediately accept his invitation to dine at that neighborhood hot spot, the Clam Casino? Of course you would.

Caroline Munro and Joe Spinell enjoy a romantic evening at the Clam Casino.

This scene breaks a certain pattern which the film has been following for its first half: Zito finds a woman and immediate kills her, then finds another woman and immediately kills her. The inexplicable courtship actually follows a sustained setpiece in which Zito stalks a nurse through the New York subway; a scene that would be even more suspenseful if a continuity error didn’t cause all the commuters to instantly vanish from one shot to the next, leaving the poor nurse suddenly alone. (A possible theory is that the editor of the film is Zito’s accomplice.) So when Zito starts dating the photographer Anna, we can only wonder what he’s trying to accomplish – to steal that photo back? To actually get laid? But no: when he drops by her fashion shoot, he steals the gold necklace of one of the models: a convenient excuse to drop by that model’s apartment, tell her he found her necklace, and then knock her unconscious and drag her back to his place, where he kills her. We are back in the pattern again, and we’re treated to a scene in which he actually apologizes to one of his mannequins for getting blood all over its face as he attaches a new scalp. It’s interesting to me that he attaches the scalp by hammering in thumbtacks. A hot glue gun might have been more effective, but Frank prefers thumbtacks.

Frank Zito hallucinates that his mannequins come to life and take revenge.

Zito is also delusional – this may surprise you – and when Anna agrees to his impromptu suggestion they visit the cemetery before heading out for another dinner, he takes her to his mother’s grave and immediately regresses to a childlike state, begins sobbing, and then imagines that Anna is his wife Rita, whom he murdered, and wants to murder again. He chases her through a foggy cemetery while 80’s synthesizer music plays; when she successfully escapes, he collapses back at his mother’s tombstone and hallucinates that she returns as a zombie, bursting out of the earth and strangling him. It’s a rough night. He goes home, but now envisions that his mannequins have come to life, each of them representing one of his many murder victims. They pin him to the bed, stab him in the chest, and slice off his hand. The next morning, the police find Zito lying in a pool of blood upon the bed, apparently dead of a self-inflicted wound. Having better things to do, I gather, they immediate leave the scene without a single line of dialogue. This prompts a zoom upon Zito’s eye as it opens, and the word MANIAC flashes on the screen. (I would have preferred the-end-question-mark.) So there you have it. William Lustig directed. He made a few low-budget horror films before making a bigger mark with Blue Underground, a DVD and Blu-Ray boutique label of which he’s now CEO, releasing beautifully restored cult films. Maniac is one of the company’s releases, and it’s also available on Netflix streaming. Here’s the world’s most violent trailer (they even show the subway continuity error!)…

Posted in Theater Caligari | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Maniac (1980)