Film Reviews by NP

Director and writer Jonathan Holbrook’s very slow, colour-drained, experiment in minimalism is probably an acquired taste. I really like it. At 2hrs and 13 minutes, chances are it goes on too long, but I don’t find that a huge problem. It isn’t an ordinary story and it doesn’t feature ordinary people. Sometimes the relentless turnaround of eccentric characters gets a little much, but this approach eases us into a world seen through the eyes of main character, paranoid schizophrenic Terrence Mackleby (Dan Crisafulli).

The style is unmistakably 1950s in flavour and throughout the moments not graced by the soundtrack, there is a feint hollow sound, like a breeze or an echo, barely perceptible, but enough to add to the mysterious David Lynch-type atmosphere.

Other sound effects are used very effectively also. Floorboard creaks, footsteps are matched with very occasional images of the Tall Men of the title – blurred, reflected, half seen behind doors. There is a genuinely unnerving style of story-telling here. And things get progressively nasty and perverse – this, on top an already skewed canvas, becomes enthralling.

Terrance is difficult to get close to as a character. That’s nothing to do with Crisafulli’s acting, which is excellent. His condition causes him to get into monetary difficulties again and again. The latest credit card company seems to offer him a way out from his troubles but the price to pay for non-repayment is nightmarish, and naturally he soon finds himself in a deadly situation. Odd, slow-burning and very powerful, 233 minutes nevertheless goes by surprisingly quickly. Recommended.

This Italian giallo film contains a tremendous musical score: that is the first thing I noticed. Luciano Michelini’s funky, jaunty soundtrack permeates throughout, bringing to life scenes of police procedure and making the action sequences even better. There are even moments of comedy in here. Are they successful? Not in the slightest, in my view, although other opinions are equally justified. To me they undermine the atmosphere without adding anything extra that is successful.

Where Sergio Martino’s direction really shines, however, is in the chase and shooting set-pieces, the best being a tremendous shoot-out on a roller-coaster ride. The fusion of calamity and the rattling soundtrack guarantees enjoyment.

A shame that such urgency isn’t injected into more of the 100 minutes, or that some pruning couldn’t have been done. For however energetic certain moments are, the film is a little too long and could have done with perhaps losing 15 minutes.

Is Martino’s mixture of styles a success? Partially, I’d say. But ultimately, I prefer my giallo more consistently dark and without the flights of comedy. It is good, but not great. Whilst it is pleasing to see the director experiment with an established style, his crowning achievement remains 1971’s untouchable ‘Strange Case of Mrs Wardh.’

This is an anthology film directed by Mario Bava, and contains three stories framed by direct-to-camera pronouncements from Boris Karloff.

The first segment, ‘The Telephone’ is a very entertaining, if rather contrived, giallo-styled thriller featuring Rosy (Michèle Mercier), a French prostitute, her friend Mary (Lydia Alfonsi) and pimp Frank (Milo Quesada). An excellent mish-mash of broken friendships healed, relentless abusive phone calls and murder. In number two, ‘The Wurdalak’, a family is plagued by a curse that appears to have afflicted the father Russian nobleman Gorca (Boris Karloff), which he brings home with him. Finally, ‘The Drop of Water’, set in 1910, features Nurse Helen Chester (Jacqueline Pierreux) who pays the price for stealing a ring from the finger of a corpse in her care.

I am not a huge fan of the colourful, darkly gaudy cinematography championed either by Bava, or later Dario Argento for projects like ‘Suspiria (1977)’. Such an approach reduces the reality of the horror, which itself is difficult enough to convey with any measure of authenticity anyway. You are never allowed to forget you are watching a professional production, with actors rather than people, so heightened is the ultimate effect. This is just my opinion of course, and who cares about that?

Having said that though, I thoroughly enjoyed ‘Black Sabbath’ a lot more than I expected to. Possibly Bava’s approach works for me here so well because the stories, by their nature, are concise and bite-sized: each story is being relayed as opposed to being ‘real’. And the wonderful use of primal colours here gives each tale a ghostly fairy-tale look which is very evocative.

Much tinkering with the format befell this production for various around-the-world sales. The American version, for example, changes the order of the stories and removes all mention of prostitution from ‘The Telephone’ (Frank is merely a ghost rather than a pimp). Bava wanted the final scene to have been Nurse Chester’s corpse, but this was also changed before production wrapped. So an utterly ingenious idea was had to feature Karloff signing off (just as he had opened the film), but in character as Gorca, before the camera pans away to reveal the horse he is riding to be nothing more than a prop, and the production crew running round waving branches to simulate the animal’s motion. Such a jarring ‘to camera’ reveal has spoiled many horrors in the past (Bela Lugosi’s ‘Mark of the Vampire’ and ‘Return of the Vampire’, for example), but works really well here because it merely accelerates the heightened reality rather than pull it out of thin air. An excellent, highly recommended anthology.

Directed with leisurely assurance by S. Craig Zahler (who is also the writer), this very witty, slow-burning western/horror hybrid is compelling viewing, even when very little appears to be happening. The long, talky scenes in the first half of the film work well because the dialogue is very natural and often genuinely amusing, all played by an excellent cast. When anything horrific or brutal occurs, it does so very quickly with barely any lead-up. Blink and you’ll miss it. However, as the 132 minute story rolls on, these occurrences move increasingly centre-stage. Getting to that point can arduous at times, however, and things drag from time to time.

The locations, stunningly filmed, perfect that balance between beautiful and unforgiving terrain. It is this environment that plays host to some stomach-churning scenes, filmed completely without spectacle, and often without the comfort of incidental music.

Can this be compared to ‘From Dusk till Dawn (1996)?’ In that ‘Bone Tomahawk’ begins as one kind of film and ends up quite another, yes it can. But in other ways, not so much. Where there was an addictive sensationalist lightness to even the more gruesome moments in Tarantino’s film, here all the frivolity is saved for the earlier, character-establishing scenes. There’s no joking when the raiders show up. Although you have to wait rather too long to see them, it is worth it.

I’m not going to name specific members of the cast because everyone is excellent, and even more than that, there are no stereotypes. Far from it. Here, personality and likability wins out over young, pretty and arrogant. If you do not have believable characters, it is that much harder to get the audience to follow them, much less invest in them. This film may well have benefitted from a bit of pruning, but it is nevertheless an immersive experience, which also does something different in its approach to horror.

I am a very big fan of low budget horror films. The limitations foisted on a tiny budgeted project often give it an intimacy and requirement to focus on characters vastly outweighs any constraints caused by lack of spectacle. And yet it is undeniably pleasurable once in a while to enter into a full-blown, richly visual, production that few million quid can bring, as opposed to a few thousand.

Jason Clarke as Dr Henry Price, Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester, Sarah Snook (who was so good as the title character in 2014’s ‘Jessabelle’) as Marion Marriot and Finn Scicluna-O'Prey as Henry Marriot. Terrific performances from the these main players, and Henry is a very convincing ‘possessed child’, even though we don’t get to know the character beforehand and therefore cannot truly embrace the transition.

Against that, we get standard scowling zombie-types, disappointing CGI cartoons and an early over-reliance on jump/shock moments in place of the atmospheric horror ‘Winchester’ seemed to promise. Equally, the dénouement is lacklustre. A kind of horror story standardised by a Disney-filter. The casting is, I think, what saves this – and there are some nice, sweeping directorial touches from The Spierig Brothers that time, money and a measure of innovation can bring.

I’m not using this review as an excuse to extoll the virtues of low-budget cinema. I enter into these horror films with an open mind and a real willingness to enjoy them. And while this is good, it is far from great. It smacks of ‘chills for the masses’, with no real urge to repulse, shock or unduly frighten the widest possible demographic.

This is a strangely disjointed film directed, written and co-produced by Joseph P. Stachura. Shari Shattuck stars as Mirium, and Eric Etebari as Gabriel, who reunite after Mirium takes a break in Venice (where the film opens) after suffering a miscarriage. After praying for another baby, Mirium, who is not taking her medication for schizophrenia, suffers a series of strange hallucinations and scary moments. During one such episode, Gabriel, who likes a drink, disappears.

This appears to be a kind of variation of ‘Rosemary’s Baby (1967)’, but quite oddly paced. The initially amusing Camio, Lilli and Amy (Jennifer Lyons, Amy Argyle and Corina Boettger), together with elderly Bella (Teddy Vincent) and Raven (Jane Park Smith) from ‘nearby’ appear to form some sort of unspecific – possibly vampiric - coven that knows more about Mirium than anyone. After the strong opening scenes in beautiful Venice, things settle, if that is the right word, into a series of scenarios that could be real/could be fantasy. After a while, it is difficult to care. Shattuck attacks her role with gusto, sometimes over-reacting to various occurrences. As if to heighten that, some of the directorial touches are sometimes heavy-handed. After a while, you get that sinking feeling that what you are watching is sadly flawed.

The two cops we meet late in the film might well be my favourite characters. Played by Candyman Tony Todd and Kiko Ellsworth, they have great chemistry and humour.

Events lead up to – although they don’t, really, they just ‘happen’ – the set-up for a sequel. A quick look at IMDB reveals ‘Scream at the Devil’ to be Joseph P. Stachura’s most recent filmic project, so such a concept is possible.

It’s a familiar story. Not this tale of Tony, who is apparently mentally handicapped, and his mother Mudi (Maud de Belleroche) and friends’ attempts to rid him of his virginity, amidst exotic, sun-kissed locations. I mean the story of a film with a certain reputation presumed lost – or woefully incomplete – found and meticulously reconstructed, proving to be … mostly unspectacular.

Not since Godzilla trudged out of the water to confront a shabby Japanese King Kong have two more mighty icons shared screen-time together. Seeing two mighty giants of giallo films – Rosalba Neri (Paola) and Edwige Fenech (Ulla) – sharing screen time together is an almost surreal scene, and it is this pairing that probably ensured interest in ‘Top Sensation’. The result spends vast amounts of its running time exploring the tremendous environment and the equally tremendous star players.

Visually, it is great. The locations are incredible and lend themselves entirely to the casual paradise in which these rich layabouts live their lives. It goes without saying Fenech and Neri are masters of their craft: naturally beautiful and exuding casual confidence and a sense of presence, it is a pity this is the one and only time they are billed together. There’s a scene featuring Fenech and a goat that is as mind-boggling as it sounds.

Mudi is pretty fixated on her son’s plight, going to the lengths of implanting hidden cameras in the yacht and copping off with Paola’s husband Aldo (Maurizio Bonuglia). The stinger here is that Tony, despite being surrounded by such wanton temptation, falls for uncorrupted local farm girl Beba (Ewa Thulin). Only then do events turn particularly strange and nasty, and the shift from mild sex-romp to drama becomes apparent. This interesting development almost feels tacked on, it arrives so late, but is still very effective and unexpected.

The final scene leaves things open-ended but fairly gloomy, which is a good contrast to the sunny, carefree hi-jinks earlier on.

There’s a lot happening in this Jess Franco film. Set in an unnamed vicinity, Dennis Price (in his final film for Franco, and looking sun-burnt but in healthier than he had in Franco’s two recent Frankenstein films) plays lawyer L'avocat Linsday, who – describing himself as aged and alcoholic – discovers that a young couple have been unfairly convicted of murder. He is told of this injustice by former governor Mendoza (Jean Guedes) on his death-bed. Traveling to the austere and corrupt institution in which they are being held, he attempts to sort the matter out.

Although this is primarily a ‘women in prison’ drama, the incarceration element only makes up part of the story. Naturally, such scenes are wonderfully bleak and adorned with much wailing and sobbing. Apart from Price, other Franco regulars on hand are a suitably cruel-looking Luis Barboo as Lenz, the always brilliant Howard Vernon as Colonel Ford, and Anne Libert, who had been so effective as bizarre bird-woman Melisa in ‘The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein’ is reduced to an unnamed thumb-sucking peripheral prisoner. I believe this is also her final film for Franco.

Usual humiliations ensue often involving fighting, torture and cruelty ensue. Raymond (Andrés Resino) and Beatriz (Geneviève Robert), the two lovers of the title, are each lead to believe their partner is dead. Beatriz’s naïve goodness puts her at loggerheads with the other inmates, whereas Raymond flirts with exhaustion and hear-death as his work pattern becomes intolerable. There’s a pretty twisted love angle involving Raymond’s affair with his godmother Emilia (Danielle Godet), which fuels her vendetta against Beatriz, whom Governor Mendoza desires. Have you got all that?

Having established Raymond and Beatriz’s incarceration as a cruel injustice, Franco’s script doesn’t seem concerned with any urgency regarding Lindsay’s mission in getting them released. Instead, we dwell more on the actions and interactions of the characters, which exploits the various layers of occasionally pantomime sadism that is part of the regular routine (incongruously involving a laser gun at one point). The finale is as low-key as you could imagine and appallingly effective. The last shot we see is of Price’s face, crumpled by disgust as he turns and walks away. Price, who died the year this film was released, turns in one of his best performances for Franco. His performances in Franco’s more bizarre films were heightened accordingly, but here, he reminds us he still has the talent that made him one of the most popular performers at the earlier stage of his career. Here’s to you, Dennis.

Interestingly, the other version of this film, known as ‘Quarter des femmes’ rejects the flashback sequences and inserts instead scenes of extra sex and cruelty, in which Libert enjoys her most substantial scene. It also adds a little extra to Lindsay’s final departure, which ends this version of the film less abruptly than the version more widely available.

This is often known as ‘Roman Polanski’s Repulsion’, so inter-twined is the director and this piece of work. Catherine Deneuve plays listless Carol, a stunning blond who acts like the dowdiest wallflower you could meet. She lives with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux), married boyfriend Michael (Ian Hendry) and is pursued – without much success – by Colin (John Fraser). The attention to minutiae in the dilapidated building is not dissimilar to the location in Polanski’s ‘The Tenant (1976)’.

In fact, that is not the only similarity – Carol could be a relation of the other film’s central Trelkovsky character; she even knocks heads with Colin as Trelkovsky does with Isabelle Adjani’s Stella in a similar scene in the later film. Equally, her comparable descent from being merely preoccupied to full paranoia to the point of hallucination adds to this exploration into her increasingly fragile mental state.

As a shocking tale of someone sliding into insanity, I found this effective, but unfairly, I feel it has dated in a way that ‘The Tenant’ has not. It is still a persuasive and occasionally unnerving depiction of madness. Deneuve is very good in it, as is the rest of the cast, and Polanski makes the most of her increasing physical and mental isolation.

Marie (Christiane Coppé) has an incurable inability to communicate with the outside world, and has been in care on three separate occasions. We first see her sitting in isolation, rocking to and fro forlornly in a chair in the misty gardens of a stately asylum. It’s the classic, haunting type of scene French Director Jean Rollin excels at. Curiously, Marie begins a rapport with fellow inmate angry, loud Michelle (Laurence Dubas), and together, they plan to escape from the institution. Once again, Rollin’s predilection for a young female duo as main players comes into play here. The two girls instantly find comfort in one another, their more tender scenes illuminated by Philippe D’Aram’s melancholy score.

To steer Rollin away from his favoured theme of supernatural horrors, Jacques Ralf was drafted in to co-script the story, much to Rollin’s discomfort. Unusually, some of the more ‘talky’ scenes were cut by the director, who usually refrains from cutting much at all. We are still left with a wordier storyline than we’re used to. Long considered a lost film, it was with great anticipation the eventual project was found – and it is that reason more than anything else that ‘The Escapees’ has not enjoyed great acclaim among Rollin aficionados: the hype put the film on a near-impossible pedestal.

Having said that, events are very slow-moving here, and not hugely filled with incident. But then, that’s a trademark of Rollin. This, however, doesn’t lend itself to the typical dream-like atmosphere due to its very real setting. The two girls’ adventures are a curious delight especially an almost surreal and rowdy erotic dance performance in the middle of a freezing night-time junkyard, and so is a very haunting set-piece in an abandoned ice-rink (Coppé was hired partly because of her proficiency as a skater).

Two increasingly disillusioned girls meeting a disparate band of other disillusioned people: dreamers, outcasts and drifters. This may not make for the most scintillating narrative, and some scenes do drag, but ‘The Escapees’ contains more than enough Rollin-esque touches to keep me happy. Equally, the oppressively drab, unfriendly, rainy, cold darkness of many of the locations still somehow comes across as being strangely poetic. Regulars including Natalie Perrey, Louise Dhour (“Sometimes it’s better not to know what your immediate future holds,”) and mighty Brigitte Lahiae (and Rollin himself) are reassuring just by being there, even if their characters are further examples of the kind of people and societies the two girls are trying to escape. The hopelessness of their ambition is compounding by a very sad finale which seems nevertheless to be tragically inevitable.

A group of people are involved in a car crash and, injured, have little choice but to spend the night in an isolated hotel that has grim secrets of its own. Imagine if this group of people comprised of your usual catwalk, characterless model/actors posing and posturing as they go through the motions of the story in the hope it will lead to something more glamorous career-wise. How forgettable would it be, how uninspired, and how much we, the audience, would be willing their graphic deaths?

What makes the difference between ‘that’ kind of bland production, and ‘Hotel of the Damned’ is that these four characters are far more interesting. Bad lad Nicky (Louis Mandylor), recently released from prison, his loyal friend Jimmy (Peter Dobson), Nicky’s resentful daughter Eliza (Roxana Luca) and her junkie boyfriend Bogdan (Bogdan Marhodin) are a mixed bunch and have a good brutal chemistry (that occasionally produces a few good laughs).

The howling cannibals they encounter aren’t quite so well defined, nor do they need to be. A kind of cross between the antagonists you would meet in ‘The Descent (2005)’ and ‘Wrong Turn (2003)’, they are a convincingly feral, inhuman bunch. However, what lets them down a little is that scenes are sometimes too dark to make out what is going on, and Director Bobby Barbacioru’s camera flourishes (and flashbacks) sometimes make us question what we are seeing and, more importantly, what the characters are seeing. But these are only fleeting problems, and not enough to blight a very solid and enjoyable horror. Recommended.

Well, this is excellent. French-Polish Roman Polanski directs and stars as shy and achingly polite bureaucrat Trelkovsky, who moves into an apartment owned by ‘the Concierge’ and Monsieur Zy (mighty Hollywood veterans Shelley Winters and Mervyn Douglas). The apartment is appallingly cramped, greasy and doesn’t even boast a toilet. Trelkovsky’s charming tolerance of the place and fellow tenants – as well as his boisterous and boorish work associates - is effective.

To make matters more awkward, the previous tenant, Simone (Dominique Poulange) jumped out of the window in a suicide attempt. A visit to the hospital reveals Simone to now be a howling, broken monster. He strikes up an awkward, but progressive relationship with Stella (Isabelle Adjani, frumped-up behind thick spectacles and a 1970’s curls, she gets gradually more bedraggled and beautiful as the story progresses).

The bullying ways of those around him, as well as his bouts of bad luck, conspire to throw Trelkovsky into a kind of chronic paranoia. It is a slow decline, and one in which his crumbling, squalid surroundings become a prison, a sick-house. He even sees phantoms of Simone unwrapping the bandages that encompass her and smiling provocatively, revealing a set of broken teeth. He flirts unsuccessfully with cross-dressing. He becomes violent. There is a certain inevitability to the horrific and shocking conclusion.

At 126 minutes, this is a long film. But it is sumptuous in its depiction of squalidity, expert in its depiction of a man losing his mind, so full of unexpected moments and so evocatively told, I cannot begrudge it a single moment.

The story is based upon the 1964 novel ‘Le locataire Chimérique’ by Roland Topor; amongst many other credits, Topor appeared as Renfield in Werner Herzog's 1979 ‘Nosferatu the Vampyre’. Good luck finding a copy for less than £100!

Giallo involving a somewhat detached Klaus Kinski, who barely takes the time to remove his hands from his jacket pockets. For such an insanely powerful actor, he isn’t allowed to do a great deal here, but that’s because he’s the mysterious masked killer. Isn’t he?

Also featured here are British actress Margaret Lee (as Cheryl Hume) and giallo legend Rosalba Neri (as Anne Palmieri). Also known as ‘Cold Blooded Beast’ and ‘Slaughter Hotel’, ‘Asylum Erotica’ is a fairly enjoyable thriller/horror/whodunit involving a murderer lurking around the grounds of a stately mental hospital. The location is tremendous, full of long and clinical rooms and corridors in which various graphic killings take place.

There are some interesting directorial flourishes from the prolific Fernando Di Leo which especially enliven the more gruesome sequences. We get tantalising glimpses of bloodied corpses, mangled inmates and staff, and convincing stab wounds – so brief are these glimpses, that we are not quite sure what we have seen.

This certainly doesn’t push the boundaries of what can be achieved in this genre, but what it does, it does well. It would have been nice to have featured more of Kinski. With his wild and striking looks only barely made respectable by a white doctor’s coat, you know his character Dr. Francis Clay might well be capable of crazed antics. Don’t you?

Ah, the private torment of the ‘secret’ alcoholic – which really isn’t a secret at all, which makes things even worse, and has you reaching for the Vodka. Emily Blunt is excellent as Rachel Watson, the main character, in this terrific adaption of Paula Hawkins’ successful debut novel of the same name. The skin-crawling description of Watson’s daily nightmare is recreated with equal relish here by director Tate Taylor. The moving of events from recognisable English suburbia to America works a lot better than I had anticipated, helped by a cast of actors from both sides of the Atlantic.

Happily, Blunt’s excellence does not exist in isolation. The ex-husband, the other woman, the other other woman, her ex and the splendid DS Riley (Allison Janney) all utterly convince as a nest of truly flawed characters. Their rough edges keep things interesting and stop events ever sinking into the melodrama they might otherwise have done. Watson’s hapless stumbling leads her into and out of trouble, her condition never allowing us to take too seriously any of her wilder accusations. Which is interesting, as some of them may be true …

A fascinating drama then, beautifully shot, both as an adaption and in its own right.

This intriguing thriller stars Henry Ian Cusik as Danny Hart, a documentary film-maker, who is either a victim or perpetrator of a crime. He’s being interviewed by police detective Martin (Steve Lang), and his story is told in flashback. Events concern striking up a conversation with Lex (Nicki Aycox), who speaks in riddles, but they become involved nonetheless. Hart’s voice-over narration reminds me of the ‘beatnik’ style of jazzy detective noirs, which is no bad thing.

Psychotic Spider (Charles Aitken), ‘the other man’ then gets in on the scene and blow me, he speaks in riddles too. They’re all at it. Richly atmospheric and enjoyably ‘knowing’ as this approach is, the impenetrability does become wearing after a while, with it becoming increasingly apparent that this is a series of evolcing set-pieces rather than anything more obvious. It’s good: I like it, but it’s all a little one-note, with no moments of progression. The performances are excellent, but the sincerity that sneaks in between the dark atmospherics exist in isolation and are difficult to truly believe in. The soliloquies are only cleared up during revelations disclosed during the police interview. On a personal level, I would love to meet someone who spoke so enigmatically, but I think we’d both need a break from each other every so often.