Mishigothic

First up! Veteran Shadowplayer and Late Shower Brandon Bentley contributes a rip-roaring entry to Project Fear — the quasi-blogathon that’s now more of an empty grave — or death ditch, if you will — for Boris Johnson’s desired yet doomed hard and early Brexit. The subject is Juraj Herz’s blood-drinking car movie FERAT VAMPIRE. Here!

As if that weren’t enough, I have a cheesy Italian Gothic for you, “presented” by Richard Gordon, British producer (TOWER OF TERROR, HORROR HOSPITAL, FIEND WITHOUT A FACE and other alliterative masterworks) who also gave us Monday’s dubbed fangfest.

“I wonder if the key to the mystery of Countess Irene’s death is… oh never mind.”

Actual dialogue from TOMB OF TORTURE, a 1963 Italian horror directed by Antonio Boccaci, who didn’t want to sound foreign so he used the pseudonym Anthony Kristye. Nice work, there.

There’s a clue to the low budget in the title: why build a castle with both a crypt and a dungeon, when you can save money and space by combining the two in a TOMB OF TORTURE? Mwuahahaa?

Damnit, I would have loved this as a kid. The scary dream sequences are full of monsters, skeletons and deformed ghouls, some of which spill out into the “real” sequences. I would have been frustrated by it not seeming to make much sense, but now I love that, so I do.

A couple of sixties chicks go exploring in a castle where Countess Irene disappeared twenty years ago. They get attacked by a deformed ghoul, find themselves in the TOMB OF TERROR, and are then, in turn, found dead in the woods by some characters in a period movie. Did their corpses travel back in time? Or did the costume department just fail to set the historical setting properly? Fiona tells me the costumes are aiming to evoke the 1910s, but I just see Carnaby Street.

Oh good, a guy in a turban and incredibly poor brownface makeup that doesn’t reach the back of his neck. Turns out this is Mr. Boccaci/Kristye, under the additional stage name of William Gray. The other best Anglo pseudonyms in this one are Thony Maky (?) and Elizabeth Queen. A perfectly reasonable name, but somehow sounds funny.

And now the locals carry the bodies off slung in a blanket, perhaps looking for a burning building so the cadavers can be bounced through an upper story window. Marvelous stuff, and I note that it’s “presented” by the same chap who did CAVE OF THE LIVING DEAD, I reckon he dubbed it and foist it upon the English-speaking world. I reckon his business card didn’t say “distributor,” but “foister.”

Inappropriate music seems to be a big thing in Euro-horror. The opening of Jesus Franco’s SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY, in which shots of bottled foetuses are overlaid with upbeat, psychedelic party tunes, will never be bettered, but the same principle can be detected in the use of sexy/romantic music for gialli, and the children’s rhyme tune in KILL, BABY… KILL! — an ingenious idea that launched a major genre cliche. It’s clear what Bava and the great Carlo Rustichelli were up to there, less clear with Franco and Hubler & Schwab were about, other than throwing things together without too much consideration or scruple, but this one is something else again. There’s some effecting Twilight Zone-style loose twanging — a sort of depressed surf guitar thing — and electric organ. But other bits are just ludicrous, like the laughing trombone that obtrudes on moments of psychological disorientation. And then there’s a love theme played as the heroine strips for a swim… OK, I understand what you’re going for. But then the disfigured henchman looms from the undergrowth… and the music continues, without changing tone at all. Hilarious. Armando Sciascia is the man we have to thank. No wonder Franco sought him out for THE EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN. He’s just the right kind of idiot to do it and do it good.

before…

….after

The deformed manservant turns out to be a butler cudgeled with a sword by the villainess, who for some reason has taken to wandering about nights in a suit of armour. On the minus side, he looks like he’s had a bad accident with some papier mache, but on the plus side, it’s apparently served as a great hair restorer. I may try this myself, if Fiona will don the requisite plate mail.

They have quite a severe hamster problem in their TOMB OF TORTURE, I regret to say.

THIS GUY is never explained. I guess probably he’s just another member of the domestic staff who got hit with a sword VERY BADLY. In the TOMB OF TORTURE.

Oh never mind.

Dubbed and doubled in doublets

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT at Film Forum, with a Skype call to Beatrice Welles introducing it. A full house – during the Super Bowl, which I gather is kind of a big deal en Amerique – because it’s a rarely screened movie. Though for the internet-savvy, ethically unclean bootlegging type of cinephile, almost nothing is rare anymore. But I’d certainly never had an opportunity to see Welles’ masterpiece on the big screen, and I hadn’t seen this new restoration.

Unfortunately, for reasons no doubt clear to the architect, the auditorium at Film Forum is built along the lines of a corridor in a German expressionist film, and we were at the back, viewing the screen as a tiny, distant window in the darkness. I could easily arrange my TV at home to fill a larger percentage of my field of vision. But I would have missed the intro, the Q&A, and the audience, who worked their way through the various kinds of laughter Shakespearian comedies get: from the “I understood that!” laugh, which is essentially humourless, to the “I understood that and it’s actually funny!” laugh, which is wonderful to hear.

Beatrice W claimed the film was missing a couple of shots from the Battle of Shrewsbury, but I didn’t spot any gaps. There are several shots in that montage which are ingrained quite specifically in my memory, and they were all present, but it’s such a long and complicated sequence that I guess some less obvious snippets could go astray and I might not notice. Still, I wouldn’t entirely take BW’s word for it without further evidence. After all, she claimed to be Welles’ executor, which I gather is not wholly true – she has the rights to OTHELLO and nothing else, though that hasn’t stopped her threatening with legal action anyone who tries to restore or complete a Welles film. (It seemed like she BELIEVES she embodies Welles’ estate, though, just as she states that her parents stayed married all their lives, ignoring the fact that Welles was living with Oja Kodar for most of that time.) She managed to get the TOUCH OF EVIL restoration pulled from Cannes, and delayed THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND for so long that the editor patiently waiting to complete it, Frank Mazzola, has died of old age. Plus, her “restoration” of OTHELLO is so inauthentic and misguided that I would hesitate before accepting her views of any other restoration job.

It was a relief to see that CHIMES’ restoration hasn’t resulted in a soundtrack cleaned up to a level of purity in never had. The synch is still uncertain – Welles is content to have characters walk through shot, albeit briskly, lips clamped shut, while their voices rabbit on over the soundtrack, so no amount of digital jiggery-pokery was ever going to render things conventionally polished. But this hardly matters. By focussing on technical flaws like this, Pauline Kael damaged the movie’s chances in America. To really love it, you have to accept Welles’ slightly idiosyncratic technical standards.

Welles described his interpretation of Falstaff as being “like a magnificent Christmas tree decorated with vices, but the tree itself is pure and good” – and the film could be said to be similar. Occasional lapses in the generally splendid production values, bold edits that don’t quite come off, dubbed Spaniards who look like dubbed Spaniards – these gives critics something to talk about but are irrelevant to the film’s sweep, beauty and emotional affect, which is greater than any other Welles movie.

The q&a after the screenings featured some pretty lame questions from the public, but fair play to Beatrice, she did manage to answer most of them in a way that was informative. Apart from being dubbed herself, she mentioned that she was also doubled, since she came down with rheumatic fever, so every time we don’t see her face, it’s actually a little French schoolboy playing the part. But then, everyone else is doubled too – I expect the clanking, armoured Falstaff who galumphs robotically about the battlefield isn’t Welles, and since Gielgud and Moreau were available for short snatches of shooting, any time you don’t see them clearly it’s someone else in a crown or a wig.

“What happened to Keith Baxter?” asked our screening companion, Farran Smith Nehme, the Self-Styled Siren, and I had to admit I don’t know. He should have had a much bigger career, I would have thought. Of course, he had the benefit of a great director here, but then so did Robert Arden in MR ARKADIN and he still came rigid and irksome. Baxter had real talent — and didn’t make another film for five years.

There’s a CHIMES book, collecting script, reviews, and interviews, and Baxter’s contribution shines. He talks about Welles filming an army charging in one direction, then optically flipping half the shots so it becomes two armies charging at each other. There’s also good info on the rather musty Spanish DVD, which has unsubtitled interviews with the likes of Jesus Franco. Unfortunately the late Mr. Franco has a very specific and thick accent, and not many teeth, so that my usual benshi film describer, David Wingrove, was only able to give us an approximate idea of what he was saying. But there’s a good bit about Welles filming in a ruined cathedral which had no ceiling and a missing wall, which he turned to his advantage — so much daylight was admitted that Welles didn’t have to use artificial lighting. As Baxter says, “Well, he was a magician.”

A thousand thanks to the Siren for a lovely evening!

I don’t know who Jack the Ripper was –

– despite the recent news stories announcing that his DNA has been identified.

Read a little closer and that story sounds extremely unlikely. A “shawl” (in reality a piece of material 8ft by 2ft, seemingly designed as a table runner) has been claimed, via a runs-in-the-family bit of lore, to have been taken from a murder scene, some guy buys it, he decides he thinks he knows who the Ripper was, he tests for that guy’s DNA using a direct matrilineal descendent, and to his joy, one imagines, his tame DNA expert makes a positive match. Turns out the shawl has bloodstains traceable to a victim (or at any rate her matrilineal descendent) and sperm cells traceable to the suspect (or his m.d.)

The trouble with all this, apart from its stupefying convenience, is that we have a complete record of the victim’s possessions, and the shawl wasn’t there. Also, the story of how the shawl came to be in the keeping of the policeman’s family is highly improbable. And we have a list of the policemen’s postings in London, and he wasn’t at the crime scene. What good is finding DNA from both suspect and victim on an object that has no relationship to their story?

Of course The Daily Mail loves this story because they can print that JTR was “a Polish lunatic.” In fact, Aaron Kosminski, the named suspect, isn’t the least plausible figure put forward for the role — I mean, he wasn’t royalty, or gay, or an eminent surgeon, or a famous painter, or any of the other things that might attract a writer to claiming his for the killer but in fact make him highly unlikely to be the guy. Kosminski was locked up for being hopelessly mad a couple of years after the killings, so there’s nothing that REALLY explains why the murders stopped, but he lived in the area, as the killer undoubtedly did, and he was apparently schizophrenic, as some serial killers of this kind apparently have been. As a Jew, he does seem a less likely fit for leaving antisemitic graffiti near one of his crime scenes, but anything’s possible.

Of course, the really interesting thing about JACK THE RIPPER is that he was never caught and cannot be positively identified. But the scholarly books laying out the often-distorted facts of the case probably don’t sell as well as the ludicrous theory books, and so the script Fiona & I wrote, JACK AND THE DAUGHTERS OF JOY, might present difficulties since we don’t say precisely who the killer is. It seems people are attracted to the unsolved case most when somebody offers a solution. It’s weird to me when I see the 1976 JACK THE RIPPER by Jess Franco or the 1959 one from Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker, in which the Ripper is safely apprehended by the authorities (in the 50s version, not so much apprehended as flattened by a nearly anachronistic elevator) which not only didn’t happen, but is practically the one thing everybody knows didn’t happen. (Also, note the hilariously prominent modern window frame in my top image.)

Historically, the movies are all ridiculous. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s comic From Hell is compelling, despite being based on a ludicrous conspiracy theory, but the movie made from it dispensed with historical accuracy immediately — the casting wrecked it before you even saw it. The worst aspect is detective Johnny Depp taking opium and having psychic visions (because that’s what opium does), none of which tell him who the killer is and so all of which are a complete waste of screen time.

The real case is so horrible that no movie intended as mere entertainment can get into the reality, and even a trace of it, whether the movie be A STUDY IN TERROR or DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE can sour the fun. The actual events, with homeless alcoholics as victims, grotesque mutilation of corpses, no picturesque gaslit fog, and a lot of confused and misguided bumbling by the authorities, is not really the stuff of an enjoyable detective or horror story. It’s several degrees darker than SE7EN.

Of course, Fiona and I cracked all those problems, but we would say that, wouldn’t we?