Taste of Fear (1961)

Posted on February 24, 2020 at 10:49 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Sometime in the early to mid-2000’s I was introduced to Scream of Fear – or, as it was titled in its native U.K., Taste of Fear (1961) – in a big-screen double feature with another Hammer chiller, The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), at a revival theater in Milwaukee. The Cushing film played first and was the main attraction, as far as my friend and I were concerned; we knew nothing about the lesser-known black-and-white suspense film that was to follow. Was this a ghost story? A Psycho-inspired slasher? As it unfolded, we could recognize it as part of the gaslighting subgenre (young woman is misguided into thinking she’s losing her mind), but screenwriter Jimmy Sangster soon proves that he has more – much more – up his sleeve. We came away from the theater liking Revenge of Frankenstein, but loving Scream of Fear. Seen in a darkened theater, the audience visibly leaning forward in their seats and responding to every jolt and turn with audible appreciation, it was clear that Sangster and director Seth Holt had created a thriller that aged almost wrinkle-free. In the years since, I acquired a collection of Scream of Fear lobby cards and a poster which proudly hangs in my home, Susan Strasberg screaming in terror at anyone who dares venture into my laundry room. And with each viewing, my affection has not diminished. Indicator recently released TASTE of Fear (let’s get that title right) as a supplement-heavy region-free Blu-ray as part of their stellar Hammer Volume Four: Faces of Fear – which also includes Revenge of Frankenstein, so you can program the same double feature. I envy those who are viewing it for the first time. I will try not to spoil too much and keep this review brief.

Robert (Ronald Lewis) drives Penny (Susan Strasberg) to her father’s home on the French Riviera.

Strasberg – daughter of Lee Strasberg (influential for his promotion of Method acting) and already a former Tony nominee for The Diary of Anne Frank – plays Penny, confined to a wheelchair after a horse-riding accident, who at the outset of the story is traveling to the French Riviera to meet with her father (Fred Johnson), whom she hasn’t seen in many years. Once she arrives, she learns that her father has been away for several weeks, leaving her alone with a chilly stepmother she’s never met, Jane (Ann Todd, The Seventh Veil); the family doctor, Dr. Gerrard (Christopher Lee, donning a French accent); and the estate’s hired driver, Robert (Ronald Lewis, from Hammer’s The Full Treatment). On her first night, she hears a strange pounding outside, and she guides her wheelchair past the swimming pool and into the swimming cabin, where she sees her father – apparently a corpse – sitting in a chair. She leaves screaming, but by the time help arrives, the corpse is gone. And so this repeats the following night. She confides to Robert that someone may be trying to prove that she’s insane, perhaps to prevent her from inheriting her father’s fortune if he truly is dead. Together, the two try to find her father’s body, believing it’s hidden somewhere on the property. As many have noted, including Sangster himself, the inspiration behind Taste of Fear was not Psycho, but Henri-Georges Clouzot’s twisty international hit, Les Diaboliques (1955). This would also be a source of inspiration for the many Hammer suspense thrillers that would follow Taste of Fear, most written by Sangster. This is the best of that line, rivaled in my mind only by The Nanny (1965), also very well directed by Seth Holt and penned by Sangster.

Ann Todd and Christopher Lee.

Confession here: as a rule, I generally dislike twists – or at least how they’re usually deployed. If everything we have previously witnessed is a complete lie, I feel like I’ve wasted my time. If whole suspense scenes lose all suspense once you know what’s “really” going on, I feel betrayed. I may be the only person on the planet who groaned at the end of The Sixth Sense, so know where I’m coming from here. Twists do have a place, and are quite at home in the mystery genre; obviously I’m not against the idea of withholding information from the audience and then giving them the opportunity to view everything they’ve seen in a new light. (Most recently, Rian Johnson plays with this brilliantly in Knives Out.) But you should leave feeling satisfied, not just manipulated. The audience plays an important role, whether as viewers of a film or readers of a book – the author is building a confidence with them, and the emotions the story evokes, the danger that the characters are experiencing, should be real at least on some fundamental level, even if the stakes are later revealed to be something quite different than we thought. On that level, Taste of Fear not only passes the test but provides a lesson. Sangster takes the story in unexpected directions right up to its final minutes, but it doesn’t lessen what you’ve experienced up to that point. He plays the game honestly, and most important, the revealed story is actually more interesting than the story it supplements – deepening it. Aspiring screenwriters, take note.

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Gandahar (1987)

Posted on February 22, 2020 at 12:39 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

In one thousand Gandahar was destroyed and all its people killed.
One thousand years ago Gandahar will be saved and all the inevitable avoided.

Gandahar (1987), released in the U.S. as the maimed Light Years, is the third and final feature length film by French animator René Laloux, of Fantastic Planet fame. Its origins reach back a decade before, when Laloux desired to adapt a novel by Jean-Pierre Andrevon, Les Hommes-machines contre Gandahar (The Machine-Men vs. Gandahar), in much the way Fantastic Planet was an adaptation of another high-concept SF novel (Oms en série by Stefan Wul). At the time, Laloux was also ambitiously attempting to launch a 10-part animated TV series to be called Les Pièges du futur (The Pitfalls of the Future), which was cut down into just one part, expanded to become a feature: Time Masters (Les Maîtres du temps, 1982), made with the legendary artist Moebius (Jean Giraud) and a crew of Hungarian animators. Gandahar was going to be a similar collaboration with a different artist as chief designer – Philippe Caza, the psychedelic draftsman who was also a veteran of Metal Hurlant, the landmark French comic magazine. But Gandahar failed to secure financing, and with focus shifting to Time Masters, it was not until years later that production could begin with the assistance of a Korean animation studio. The result is more polished, consistent, and complete-feeling than Time Masters (no major slight to that film, which is among my favorite animated features), acting as a fitting bookend to a Laloux SF trilogy.

Ambisextra, who governs the land of Jasper on the planet Gandahar.

The sophisticated plot takes a backseat to Laloux’s continued obsession with alien flora and fauna – where the fauna is often also flora. An extended opening prologue evokes Fantastic Planet with its narrative-free observations of the strange creatures on Gandahar, making it clear to us that there are no strong boundaries to divide humanoid, plant, and beast. Animals are born budding out of the soil, and a green-skinned woman breastfeeds a long-snouted creature. Even some of the architecture resembles living things, like a home that looks like it once was a giant tortoise, and, most central to the film, a palace which is carved to resemble a giant nude woman, whose head detaches to become an escaping ark in times of crisis. But as the story progresses, another conceit moves closer to the spotlight, that part of this continuum includes machines. “Mirror birds” used by Ambisextra, who leads the Council that rules the land of Jasper, are living cameras that can broadcast footage back to the palace. A flying manta ray used by the hero Sylvain has skin that looks like metal plates bolted together, an airplane-creature. Yet the threat encroaching upon Gandahar is an army of Metal Men, covered in black armor and with glowing red eyes, firing lasers from their fingers which turn the planet’s inhabitants into statues, like the Blue Meanies invading Pepperland in Yellow Submarine (1968). The Metal Men are led by one they call the Great Procreator, and they despise the “civilization of wasteful pleasure.” Placing the petrified natives into eggs, they deliver them to a glowing door, out of which they emerge as more metal soldiers. Sylvain is dispatched to untangle this mystery, joining up with a woman named Airelle, and eventually discovering a giant living brain floating in the Circumscribing Ocean: the Metamorphis, which claims no sinister intent. Back home, the Council reveals they created Metamorphis as an experiment, but it seems to have evolved into something more powerful. Deepening the mystery are the Transformed, mutants exiled to the underground who once had the gift of foresight, now stripped down to just a handed-down prophecy, quoted at the top of this article. They speak in past and present tense at once: “He was/will be from Gandahar.”

Living weapons used by the natives of Jasper attack the Metal Men.

The story is guided by a gentle and appropriately alien score by Gabriel Yared (The Talented Mr. Ripley, The English Patient), which follows in the footsteps of Fantastic Planet, expressing curiosity and wonder for the lifeforms of the world, and militaristic, electronic chants for the armies of Metal Men. The visuals invoke the colored-pencil look of Fantastic Planet, as though you’re seeing pages from a graphic novel come to life, though here the animation is notably more sophisticated: when Sylvain and Airelle are absorbed into the Metamorphis, they become cells traveling through blood vessels; when Sylvain uses his gun, it fires seeds which sprout fast-growing thorn bushes that puncture his enemies; the Gandahar soldiers ride dragonflies and drop bombs that turn into pale vine creatures with sharp teeth, holding the Metal Men tight before swallowing them whole. When Sylvain and the Transformed travel one thousand years into the future, they walk across a Gandaharian landscape like the cover of an 80’s heavy metal album, the surface of the planet covered in a black metal sheen, all organic things destroyed, asteroid-like rocks twisting overhead like debris flung up after the planet had been remade. The world of the natural, on the other hand, has lightly erotic overtones, with abundant nudity and some of the natural objects resembling certain sexual organs – though never in any explicitly obvious or unintentionally humorous way. This is one of the most successful aspects of Gandahar, the way the film expresses its vision of all of nature being connected, and the obscene way it wars with itself without justification: here, the machines are just as organic as the creatures they enslave – they’ve just forgotten.

Sylvain and Airelle travel through the Metamorphis.

Gandahar was released in 1988 as Light Years after Harvey Weinstein purchased the film, cut it down (removing one of the film’s more erotic moments), hired Isaac Asimov to write dialogue for prestige value, and enlisted an all-star cast for the English dub, including Glenn Close, Christopher Plummer, and some oddball choices like Paul Shaffer and Penn and Teller (yes, Teller). Apparently deciding his artistic interference was sufficient for a major credit, the film now stated it was “directed by Harvey Weinstein” – an artistic assault if ever there was one. Nonetheless, the film received a major theatrical release with large print ads. This was the era, pre-Disney animation’s comeback, when such a remarkable thing could happen, but something as distinctive – and European – as Gandahar was never going to be a big hit in the U.S. I caught up with it on home video shortly after its release, and my brain couldn’t quite handle the weird rhythms, a reaction very similar to my too-early exposure to Fantastic Planet. About fifteen years later I rented an old VHS tape again, finding it fascinating but also clearly mutilated. I could recognize that there was a movie underneath struggling to get free. Luckily, Eureka in the U.K. released the uncut film on DVD in 2007, allowing English-speaking viewers like myself an opportunity to finally appreciate what Laloux was attempting without Weinstein’s greasy fingerprints all over it. It remains a beautifully bizarre film, asking us to learn its extraterrestrial rules at our own pace – free of any kind of hand-holding narration – and giving us glimpses into its many interdependent cultures that range from the colossal to the microscopic. That even the machines are found to sit on the same time-looping evolutionary chain is key to Laloux’s vision, one he carried through all three of his feature films: we’re all interconnected, and we need to push back our conflicts to truly evolve.

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Deathstalker (1983)

Posted on February 15, 2020 at 3:36 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

The success of Conan the Barbarian (1982) didn’t just make Arnold Schwarzenegger a star; it also launched a thousand knock-offs. Roger Corman was behind a good number of them, naturally. In the early 80’s Corman was invited by two members of the Argentine film industry, Héctor Olivera and Alejandro Sessa, to make some films in Argentina, in light of the country’s economic woes at the time and the low rates, skilled labor, and subsidies the country could provide. First out of the gate was the Conan clone Deathstalker (1983), co-produced by Olivera and Sessa, with a largely Argentinian crew and directed by James Sbardellati, who had graduated up the Corman ranks after acting as an assistant director on films like Humanoids from the Deep and the Star Wars cash-in Battle Beyond the Stars (both 1980). In the years that followed, the Corman/Olivera/Sessa partnership would produce The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984), Wizards of the Lost Kingdom (1985), Barbarian Queen (1985), Amazons (1986), and Deathstalker II (1987), along with a handful of films with no fantasy element. These constitute only a fraction of the sword and sorcery films released to exploit the success of Conan; they don’t even represent all of Corman’s. Yet the trashy, trashy – let me pause to think of another appropriate adjective – really trashy Deathstalker stands as the most iconic film of this motley crew for two reasons. The first is the glistening-muscle poster art by Peruvian-born painter Boris Vallejo, who was closely associated with pulp fantasy thanks to his airbrushed covers for Conan, Tarzan, and Gor paperbacks, as well as The Savage Sword of Conan magazine from Marvel and the many “Boris” art books which became staples of the fantasy section of every bookstore. The second is the sheer ubiquity of the film in the 80’s – the fact that it was given a theatrical release seems marginal in light of its constant presence in video stores and on late night HBO. Through 1991 the film would spawn three sequels, each attempting to lure more customers with its Boris art and the promise of some lowbrow sex and violence.

Deathstalker (Richard Hill) and Princess Codille (Barbi Benton).

Deathstalker certainly doesn’t stand out from the pack for anything quality-related, artwork aside. Corman’s penny-pinching and disinterest in anything that’s not a commercially exploitable element is evident throughout, which is also, of course, a mark in its favor if you’re viewing it strictly for camp value. Anything not featuring sex or violence has been trimmed, leaving a narrative that’s not boring, but possibly whiplash-inducing. A creature featured early in the film looks like one of Ernie Kovacs’ Nairobi Trio; another is a hand puppet that eats the eyeballs and fingers of a chained slave. Most women are naked most of the time. One of the most amusing things about the film is comparing what’s depicted in Vallejo’s art with the equivalent in the film: the towering pig-faced ogre is a much more pathetic – and human-sized – creature on celluloid, whose biggest moment might be when he picks up a pig’s head from a banquet platter and takes a cannibalistic bite out of it. Our hero introduces himself as an antihero’s antihero by rescuing a “girl from the valley” who’s about to be raped by mutants, then molesting her himself. (Whether or not you count this as a sexual assault depends on how you interpret the sexist trope of the woman immediately enjoying the experience. That makes this scene less hard-edged than I remembered it – though as soon as they’re interrupted, she slips off, hopefully for greener pastures and better roles.) Deathstalker meets a deposed king who asks him to find his daughter Codille, but our protagonist doesn’t take much interest until a witch promises him great power if he takes possession of three magical items, “powers of creation”: a sword of justice, an amulet of life, and a chalice of magic. The latter two are in the possession of the evil Munkar (Bernard Erhard), who wishes to secure his grip on the throne by staging a fighting tournament, the sole purpose of which is to destroy the strongest men who might threaten him. One of those contenders is the athletic swordsman Oghris (Richard Brooker), who can be distinguished from Deathstalker because when he rescues a maiden he doesn’t rape her, and also because he has a British accent. Later, Deathstalker kills him, naturally. I forgot to mention the scene when the witch suddenly appears in a reflection in a river, shrieking at our hero, “Deathstalkah!”

The sinister Munkar (Bernard Erhard).

The first half of the film is a hodgepodge of random fantasy ideas and names, none of which mean anything to the audience, and which, honestly, probably didn’t mean much to screenwriter Howard Cohen (Saturday the 14th), either. 80’s sword and sorcery B-movies, particularly those from New World, are unlikely to offer up any Tolkienesque maps or rich fictional histories. It’s inexplicable when Salmaron (Augusto Larreta), imprisoned in a cave with a rubber puppet for a face, tells Deathstalker that he’s prophesied to be rescued by “a boy who is not a boy,” and just as inexplicable when Deathstalker leads him out of the cave by turning into a boy and then back again. Munkar’s servant Kang (Victor Bo) turns into a hawk at the story’s outset, but it’s a concept which is never brought up again. The three “powers of creation” are just tokens for Deathstalker to collect, like in some 80’s fantasy board game. Honestly, all of this is in the tradition of lesser sword and sorcery dating back to the genre’s initial boom in the late 60’s with Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs imitations, continuing with the numerous loincloth-clad barbarians of comic books in the 70’s; movies were the natural next step. (Even the official Conan sequel, Conan the Destroyer, and the unofficial one, Red Sonja, have more in common with thinly-plotted barbarian pastiches than anything Howard wrote in the 30’s. Those movies aren’t that much more respectable than Corman’s.) But Deathstalker takes license from Conan the Barbarian‘s R-rated edge by deploying sex and gore at a constant, assembly-line pace. Lana Clarkson, later star of Barbarian Queen, wears nothing but a cape and a thong – we see her bared breasts before we see her face. Buxom Playboy model and one-time country music star Barbi Benton, as the captured princess, spends most of the film struggling (and failing) to keep her clothes on while thugs and mutants and a Deathstalker paw at her. Munkar’s palace is like a medieval Playboy Mansion, one with a mud wrestling pit conveniently located in the throne room. Deathstalker is not a good movie, but it knows exactly what kind of film it wants to be: trash, with some wizardry thrown in. It’s a low bar to clear, but low is what Deathstalker is all about.

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