Archive for Kill Baby Kill!

House Warning

Posted in FILM with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 25, 2022 by dcairns

One reason Damiano Damiani might be more obscure than he deserves, despite his easy-to-remember name, is that his two biggest films were artistic disasters. The Leone-produced A GENIUS, TWO PARTNERS, AND A DUPE (aka NOBODY’S THE GREATEST) is usually consigned to the less-said-the-better bin, though I plan on giving it another try. We took a look at the De Laurentiis-produced AMITYVILLE II: THE POSSESSION, in the spirit of excavation — could anything be retrieved from the rubble of this sequel/knock-off?

It was a bold, trashy idea: make a sequel to the very successful (but dull) THE AMITYVILLE HORROR while also ripping off THE EXORCIST. Despite the US locations and studio filming at Churubusco in Mexico where the DeLaurentiis-Lynch DUNE was shot, this can be categorized alongside all those Italian imitations of the Blatty-Friedkin blockbuster, except that surprisingly it omits nearly all the gross (and highly commercial) elements.

The script is credited to Tommy Lee Wallace, something of a specialist in sequels to other peoples’ films; Dardano Sacchetti, frequent Lucio Fulci collaborator and schlockmeister, seems also to have contributed. The movie’s a prequel, purporting to show what happened to the family who died in the house before James Brolin et al moved in — which we kind of already know. And the story has the son called Sonny aiming a rifle at Dad’s head within minutes, so there’s not a great distance to cover.

Still, there’s good news: the actors are decent. Burt Young is the paterfamilias and Damiani, in it for the money, at least tries to interest himself in the possibility of this being a portrait of a dysfunctional family. Jack Magner as Sonny is very good indeed, required to go through a hell of a lot of transformations, both emotional and physical. Everyone, even the kids, seems well up to their tasks, though the family does initially seem both a parody of American family life, a step removed from The Simpsons, and at the same time more Italian than American — bursting into song, squabbling at high volume, becoming hysterical — which set of stereotypes are we going for?

But the abusive father stuff is authentically disturbing, which is good because non of the cod-supernatural stuff is a bit scary. There are some good practical effects but everything aiming at suspense is slathered over with Lalo Schifrin’s hackneyed score. He repeats the spooky lullaby approach first trotted out in Mario Bava’s KILL, BABY, KILL! — I guess it has an authentic Italian lineage but it’s pretty old by now and feels tired as hell. Schifrin was fired from THE EXORCIST, Friedkin at one point hurling part of his score out of the cutting room and across the WB parking lot, and this doubtless is his revenge. Damiani should have slung it from one of those quarter-circle window eyes.

The other angle Damiani finds to excite some interest is the mental illness one: if it weren’t for all the pyrotechnics, much of the story, even the bladder effects, could work as a rather tasteless exploration of schizophrenia. Sonny hears demon voices urging him to kill from his Walkman, the best use of the film’s 1982 setting (but if it’s a prequel to the ’79 film, the device wouldn’t have been available, surely?)

The intriguing parts, like Sonny’s Sony, are underexploited — the initial possession, with the camera plunging down on the partly-undressed young man like a spectral rapist, isn’t developed into anything more disturbing than consensual sibling incest (which is a BIT disturbing). And then all the main characters die, except Sonny, who becomes largely unavailable to us except as a bloviating demon voice, articulated through a set of disfiguring Albert Steptoe teeth.

Fortunately or otherwise, the film has established a priest, James Olson — Father Adamsky, a Damien Karras clone with the interesting parts deleted. He even has a blandly cheerful chum — “What’s this guy doing in the film?” I asked. “Father Karras had a priest pal, so he has to have one too,” diagnosed Fiona. Even if he has no story function whatsoever.

Rebooting the story, after the massacre, into another kind of thing altogether should be the film’s most original trope, but it merely completes the metamorphosis into EXORCIST MCMLXXXII: IT’S A BOY. In the rush to banality, nobody even wonders if Sonny might be insane. At one point, Moses Gunn is required to facilitate a jailbreak so an exorcism can occur, and it turns into a replay of Norval’s escape from THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN’S CREEK. “Oh I couldn’t do THAT, Mr. Kockenlocker,” one longs to hear Olson say. (The Sturges film also portrays a violent dad, a defiant child, an oppressive home — “The house ain’t paid for yet!” — and a miraculous ending.)

And, through it all, Damiani stays engaged — the blocking of actors and camera is consistently excellent in what I suppose we must call the dramatic scenes. The job was not just a paycheck, it was also I guess a potential calling card, but one soiled by the tackiness of the project: nobody much noticed Magner’s nuanced and compelling performance, or Damiani’s skill with the camera (making it rise over his young leads head and turn upside down at one point — and having this make some kind of sense).

The film finds its place alongside Richard Fleischer’s 3D follow-up: skilled works by inventive artists that never rise to the status of interesting stories because the material is so flat and derivative. A perfect double feature if you’re feeling too inspired and optimistic and need to be let down a bit.

Operazione Paura

Posted in FILM with tags , , , , , , , on November 13, 2019 by dcairns

It occurs to me that Boris Johnson would be good casting for HG Wells’ invisible man, with his unpigmented hair and psychopathic personality and thirst for power, but there he is, on television, horribly visible.

Mario Bava’s KILL, BABY… KILL! was released in Italy as OPERAZIONE PAURA, which loosely translates as PROJECT FEAR, so I should really have written about it in our Project Fear blogathon, and maybe I can catch up with it on Friday 13th December when the general election results come in. Instead, we watched THE WHIP AND THE BODY and HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON (really more of a cleaver) but I didn’t get around to saying anything about them.

Bava notoriously made KBK from a script of, I think it was, twenty-five pages. Surely WHIP’s source document must have been ever shorter, given the amount of atmospheric prowling around gloomy corridors the director perpetrates to make up the time. Olivier’s HAMLET has nothing on this. The sadomasochistic relationship at the centre of the story is quite compellingly drawn, though, the photography is luminous, and Chris Lee looks good in that fringe he seemed to acquire for European movies around this time (his No. 2 hairpiece). Too bad he never recorded his own line readings: Lee with someone else’s voice is only half the pleasure.

This is another movie that screwed itself by being too much too soon, like WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? Arguably audiences weren’t ready for such naked sadism in 1963, and censors certainly weren’t, either banning it outright or cutting it until it no longer made even marginal sense.

HATCHET is basically AMERICAN PSYCHO, with similar games played with reality and perception. Stephen Forsyth shows us what that movie would be like with a genuine blank at its centre — a lot less fun to watch. He’s absolutely appropriate but not very entertaining. Bava shot this one himself, but it has neither the Gothic trappings nor the pop-art pizzazz of his finest work.

Interesting, though, for what Bava steals from others — the Hitchcock-Freud recovered memory plot — and from himself — a clip from his own BLACK SABBATH plays on a television.

Project Fear: the banners

Posted in FILM with tags , , , , on October 18, 2019 by dcairns

PROJECT FEAR is probably only a quasi-blogathon, but I think it still ought to have some banners. It’s quasi because very possibly most of the guest writers will be posting here, rather than on their own blogs, which they don’t have.

Since this is a quasi-blogathon not only about European horror movies, for Halloween, but also (subtextually) about Brexit, for Halloween, these banners can all be read as depicting the state of the nation in a hypothetical post-Brexit world which I still hope isn’t going to occur.

Will Britannia be a terrified woman sinking to the floor, disemboweled from within, under the horrified eyes of her loved one, or a stunted zombie outside looking in with the cold eyes of a vengeful corpse? Or else a lonely immortal, knitting in solitude? Or just an eyeball?

Only time, the courts, parliament, and the deeply psychopathic leaders of the Conservative Party, will tell.

I’m still happy for folks to jump on board this thing with contributions. Just let me know at some point. It runs, as the banners hint, between November 27th and the Day of the Dead.